JetBlue Airways: How to use social media to connect with your customers on a real level.

JetBlue Airways has a pretty amazing system for their customer service and outreach. The Social Media and Customer Commitment Team Leader at JetBlue, manages around 90 team members of which 25 are dedicated to the social media areas. JetBlue keeps a 24/7 watch of their Facebook and Twitter accounts, with as many as 4 people working on each area. Through their Twitter handle, they typically respond back within 10 minutes and on Facebook between 2-4 hours. The social media team also provides a ton of insight for the JetBlue marketing team. Since they are right there experiencing customer communications as its happening.

JetBlue began using social media back in 2007, when social media was very new. The company was facing an extreme amount of backlash and bad press as thousands of their flights were canceled due to an ice storm. Many passengers ended up with massive delays, some spanning days. The company’s founder and CEO, David Neeleman took too YouTube and engaged customers by posting a heartfelt and honest apology and acknowledgement of their failure and explained how the company would fix it in the future. Their openness won them a lot of brownie points with their customers.

Since then JetBlue has been using Twitter and Facebook to reach customers and provide not only marketing but great customer service. Their fans love it. They are accessible and really focus on building relationships with people. The social media team members are trained to be themselves, they have their own voice when communicating with customers through social media. A great example of how they form valuable bonds with their customers is when @GavinDonovan had tweeted the JetBlue team a few times about wanting his own theme song(the Hulk Hogan theme music) to play when he boarded his plane. He didn’t have a flight booked at the time but they stayed in touch with him and 4 months later when he did board a flight the theme music was playing.

I think their approach to social media is amazing. They blend customer service and marketing into a wonderful and fun package. They don’t just focus on issues and complaints they engage their clients in fun, imaginative ways, which makes them seem like a far more human company. Yet there are also super responsive to helping when people do have a problem and make sure to go above and beyond to help.