Connects catching on
starallianceconnects.com, the website created to put employees of the member airlines in touch with one another, is gaining interest among employees.
The site is an expanded version of the older FaceMap project in which employees were encouraged to connect with fellow employees around the world by placing their photos and brief information about themselves on a map of the world.
That site had very limited capabilities, but was successful enough and had enough potential to encourage us to expand the site into something more than just photos on a map.
The Connects site, available through a link on this site, is getting about 75,000 page views per month, which is a good indicator of the site’s popularity. Users have loaded about 1,000 photos to the galleries section so far, another sign that members are enjoying the features of the network.
Feedback from employees indicates that they do want a way to connect with staff around the world and the site allows them to do that. By clicking on the “Find People” section they can search by name, airline, job, interests etc. and quickly find like-minded people who have registered. There is also a great deal of interest in people inviting other people to be friends so that’s an interesting outcome.
We encourage users to also post their travel tips and website links to travel sites that they have found useful.
For the future, there are dozens of widgets that can be included in the site including personal blogs, twitter feeds etc. that can be included as time and budget permit. What else is done depends on the users and what they want to see.
Connects is a sub-site of the our main employee site, http://www.staralliancemployees.com/, which we developed a couple of years ago. Users can link to the site from Connects and vice-versa. The employee site houses all of our publications, photo galleries, video, daily news updates, a knowledge quiz, RSS etc., so quite valuable for employees who want to keep up on Star information.
