Amazing Social Media Successes   

Social Media is everywhere. But like most things that are ubiquitous some clever people are taking it to the next level...

Nerd Birds

On 8th April 2011, Virgin America took delivery of an Airbus A320, the 39th aircraft in its growing fleet and the very first in the world to be given a hashtag as a name. #nerdbird is currently transporting passengers around North America.

Nerd Bird was first used as a nickname for the American Airlines flights between Boston Logan (KBOS/BOS) and San Francisco because they mostly carried blue-chip business people.


Tweeting Plane

One of Air Baltic's Bombardier Dash-8 Q400 NG regional aircraft is currently tweeting as it flies around Europe.

@TweetingPlane

Also, as it pulls ahead of most other airlines in the social media race, Air Baltic has a campaign running at the moment where once a month a poll is posted on their Facebook page asking for Air Baltic destinations, and the most popular response gets 20% slashed off its price the following week.


KLM Surprises

The single best example of Social Media in action I've ever seen.

I'll not spoil the amazingness of it. Just watch this. Some Kleenex may be necessary if you're easily overwhelmed by acts of random human kindness like me!




OK, cynical head on and it's a marketing exercise, however, the personal aspect of it makes it different.

They could have so easily just given £15 iTunes vouchers to random customers but the uniquely personal gifts and the face to face delivery of those gifts truly make it impactful and special.

There's another KLM Surprise not mentioned in the video that I heard about. A guy flying from Schiphol, Amsterdam to New York had tweeted that he was annoyed that he was going to miss some football (soccer) matches while he was away in the US. However, when he arrived at his gate to board the plane he was met with a map, on that map were all the locations, including dates and times, that would be showing all the football matches for his team around his hotel in New York.

Now I bet that was weird. But I bet he's a KLM customer for life!