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Twitter Tweets and Tales

Mt. Dew's DEWmocracy & Jet Blue's Twitter programs engage customers - Day One Highlights from #PMABlur

By Guest Blogger, Donna DeClemente, Donna's Promo Talk

Last week in my post I wrote this post about my upcoming trip to Chicago to attend PMA's Integrated Marketing Conference. Well I'm here now and there's lots of great conversations going on. Day one of Blur,got underway underway yesterday, so here's my report:

I arrived in Chicago a little behind schedule since my plane out of Rochester was delayed because the crew was late! They arrived with breakfast bags in hand and told us once we got settled on the plane that they had a late night.

I just became a new user of Foursquare and used the location-based tool to do my first official check-in at the Fairmont Hotel here in Chicago and got my first points. The only other “friend” that checked in at the Fairmont was David Berkowitz. He’s been using the tool much longer then I have and has been on a multi-city trip around the country the past couple of weeks. So when I caught up with him later I asked for a few tips on how this is supposed to work.

PMAI missed the opening session which was a welcome from Bonnie Carlson, PMA’s president, and then the opening keynote from Univision Communications. I settled in to hear Marc Hanson from Pepsi’s Mt. Dew speaking about their integrated marketing campaign, DEWmocracy. They ran the first part of this campaign in the summer of 2008, tying into the presidential election year. They asked consumers to vote for their next Mt. Dew in which they gave them a choice of a red, white or blue flavor. Voltage, a red raspberry flavor, won with 43% of the votes and Mt. Dew rolled out the new product in 1st quarter ’09.

IndexThe ROI Mt. Dew saw was 36 million cases of product sold, 85% which was incremental. They achieved this through off-shelf placements in end caps, coolers and other locations at retail. They claim that the campaign was all about “bringing the voice of consumers and a unique product to store shelves”.

JetBlueI’m skipping now to my favorite break-out session of the afternoon which was in the Digital track from the marketing team at Jet Blue, Morgan Johnston and Tara Ryan-Carson. They shared with us some of what they’ve learned over the past year as they’ve experimented with social media, mostly Twitter. They started off talking about how they dealt with a crisis situation when one of their jets sat on the tarmac at JFK for hours enraging customers and becoming a PR nightmare. They learned that they needed to listen to the customers' complaints and explain to them as best they could how they were going to fix it for the future.

Their All You Can Jet Pass was the campaign that really proved to them how powerful social media could be. They announced the launch of this 30-day pass in August with a simple PR release and a tweet. Customers started using the hashtag #AYCJ and tweeting about it. Those that bought the pass started sharing stories about where they were going with it and what they were doing. One guy got a tattoo from every destination he visited and shared his photo.

Jet Blue received an enormous amount of free media from this which reached 232.5 million people and saw a 700% increase in views to their route map. They also had a goal to increase their Facebook Fan base at the time and did by running a AYCJ sweepstakes on the social network.

Jet Blue Cheeps, a new, separate Twitter page, was launched to tweet sales of flights that they have extra seats to fill. They don’t follow anyone, other than the JetBlue page, so it’s focus is strictly to once a week just announce theses last-minute discount fares.

2010 is Jet Blue’s 10th Anniversary and they will be celebrating all year. They started off the celebration in New York with a Twitter Street Team promotion in which they we’re giving away free tickets to anywhere they fly. They sent out a PR release on a Monday announcing the program saying that they would be asking people to find them on a certain day and bring them a birthday card to get their free tickets.

That Wednesday they sent out Tweets of where they were located in the city and immediately people came running. They started out in the morning downtown in the financial district on Broadway, moved to Union Square around lunchtime and ended up at Roc Center later in the afternoon. They gave away about 1,000 free tickets and word of the promotion went viral resulting in 10,000 tweets globally.

So here’s the big take away….after starting out with a disastrous experience in which customers used social media to share negative comments, Jet Blue then embraced the medium and made it work for them.

Today is another full day of speakers and sessions, so stayed tuned. We’ll be ending tonight with the annual Reggie Awards gala and dinner with entertainment from Michelle Branch. Any of you that are at the conference, please let us know what your favorite session was and why. Thanks!

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