JetBlue and social Media
On Valentine’s Day 2007, thousands of planes were canceled due to bad weather on the East coast. The so-called “JetBlue’s “Valentine’s Day Crisis” made national headlines, and the brand, which marketed itself as bringing humanity to air travel, was plunged into chaos” (Gianatasio, 2013).
According to Jayson DeMers, “knowing your business’s strengths and weaknesses is critical for building brand equity and sticking around for the long haul”. Despite the fact that social media was still in the early stages, JetBlue took the opportunity to engage its customers through YouTube apologizing about the incident and sharing about how the company planned to improve it. The company soon realized the power of listening and connecting with its customers, “as Marty St. George, senior vice president of marketing for JetBlue explains, that means the company needs to do most of its outreach via digital media”.
As of now, JetBlue has over 1 million fans on Facebook; where the company typically replies within a few hours, and while they do push the airline, its posts have a diversity of content that is engaging — from company specials, travel blogs, great storytelling videos, to even recognizing other countries independence’s day.
On Twitter, JetBlue has over two million followers and the company usually replies within a minutes. Its posts are fun and sassy. My personal experience with JetBlue immediately helped me to connect emotionally with the brand after tweeting “For this week’s homework I’ll be writing a blog about @JetBlue #gradschoolprobs.” Personally, I was not expecting much of a response from a very generic statement. But a few minutes later JetBlue responded: ”while you’re hanging out this week be sure to send us more tweets!”.
The company has certainly done a great job at leveraging the power of listening to social media chatter to provide customer service and engage with its fans and customers over promoting solely the brand.
In fact, JetBlue has utilized YouTube to engage users with real-time issues like the “Reach Across The Aisle” campaign:
JetBlue’s charming personality on Social Media has captured the attention of many.