Wednesday, March 18, 2009

JetBlue and Social Networking Differentiation

Some companies "get" social networking and some companies just don't. ("Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you choose between the two." But I digress.
Take JetBlue, and its perspective on social networking. Morgan Johnston, the guy behind many of the airline's tweets, told me how JetBlue stumbled in the beginning of its Twitter experience and then figured out a way to engage its followers. Today, if you can't figure out where to drop your bag at the airport, give JetBlue a tweet and the airline will try to hook you up, Johnston says.
But, alas, I follow companies on Twitter all day long and see them just pumping out promotion after promotion. There's no personality to it. No candor. No transparency. Duh, little value.
Some companies just don't get it.
I liken it to the difference between an effective PR person and an ineffective one (you know who you are...or maybe you don't.) The good ones will level with you and not try to spin a journalist like a top. For the others, all they do is spin, spin, spin -- and these have no credibility.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is true. Companies don’t have a choice in the matter; they need to get into the social media game. But, do they need to spam???

Interesting to note....
Actually, at ITB, they had a blogger conference. They said that blogging and social media is a full-time job. In fact, many companies will start to hire someone that all they do day in and day it is tweet, update facebook, engage people in the blogosphere.

Anonymous said...

For a company Twitter account, I imagine it is difficult to strike that balance between personality/company image/promotion. I have yet to really find one I would speak to.

Dennis Schaal said...

Ya, Heidi... I agree and that was my point. When companies promote, promote, promote 24/7 it is a form of spam.
And, on the employment angle, it sounds like the fastest-growing occupation is for Faceblogtweeters:)

Anonymous said...

It's not surprising that companies are doing this, I have a friend who tweeted something negative about a company, and within a few hours that company had private messaged him about his tweet, and offered to "make it right"

I was pretty impressed.

DKN Digital said...

Conversation and a running dialog is definitely the key to a corporate Twitter account. JetBlue and Southwest do a great job of using this social media for customers.

www.travelmarketing101.travel

Anonymous said...

Not to say that peddling promotions on social networking sites is a good thing, but it can't beat Virgin Atlantic's foray into social networking is a high bar to beat, in terms of a lack of understanding of how it works. They ended up firing 13 of their own flight attendants few months back for derogatory statements made on the company's own Facebook page.