JetBlue has a mixed history within social media. It had major difficulties one Valentine’s Day, when passengers were stranded on a plane for nine hours whilst de-icing equipment was sought.

This was the moment the company adopted digital marketing and its CEO publicly apologised via YouTube. After this event the firm developed its own bill of rights and automatically provides details of compensation (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2011) and uses Twitter as a customer service platform, allowing staff to display personality and use humour. The transformation that’s taken place is demonstrated by the language in these tweet responses:

@NAME Bummer! We’re hoping it is back on soon!

@NAME We love you back

@NAME Glad to hear someone is liking it!  

Questions

• Consider a time when you complained via social media. How did the organisation respond?

• Were there any surprises in terms of the tone of voice used, or the format of the response?

• What organisations can you identify which have transformed their business via digital marketing?