So no doubt you’ve heard about the enormous popularity of JetBlue’s $599 All You Can Jet Pass announced last month. As was expected, seats sold fast – so much so that JetBlue had to end the program earlier than anticipated! Mission accomplished, right? Well maybe - in the old world that is - but not today. You see the All You Can Jet Program is just getting started. Ever since the pass was announced, eager travelers have been busy at work planning routes (traffic to the JetBlue route map has increased over 700% since the announcement), arranging for time off to travel like mad, and connecting with other members of their elite community of lucky travelers. A simple promotion to move seats has now become a social movement whether JetBlue planned it to be or not.

So what exactly happened? Well, JetBlue tapped into a passion shared by millions – Travel, with an innovative program that inspired thousands of lucky participants enough to establish whole new communities. In fact, it such a movement that even travel agents are getting involved. According to Jaunted.com, new micro-social communities and offerings have been quickly established around the program including blogs – Where We Jet and Twelve Hours in a City, dedicated twitter accounts like @599club to share experiences, and even special travel packages built exclusively around JetBlue destinations and All You Can Jet travelers. Amazing!

The big lesson learned here is that great marketing is great marketing and when you can tap into a communities’ needs and passions, the possibilities are limitless. For those of you trying to figure out your social media strategy – spend less time thinking about the medium and more time thinking about the message and the potential that message has to start a dialog or unite a community. Once you nail that, you can think about building an integrated marketing and communication program that helps you spread the word – and if you are lucky, like JetBlue, your customers may even do that for you.

‘Til Next Time