@JetBlue: It's fun, but does it scale?

When JetBlue joined Twitter in the spring of 2007, it was one of the first major brands to do so. Today, the company has nearly a million followers, and its account is often cited as an example of smart corporate twittering. But the company started out on Twitter with modest goals. It wanted to help customers.

“Some people were asking for help, and others were saying things that weren’t correct,” recalls JetBlue’s manager of corporate communications, Morgan Johnston. He’d been spending time onTwitter search, and he’d realized that JetBlue customers, often on the move, were Twittering about travel problems. “You can only see that a few times before you want to jump in and do something.”

Testing the waters

He proposed the idea of setting up a JetBlue account on Twitter and cleared it with marketing and corporate communications executives at his company. They were very supportive—in part because they could start by just dipping a toe in the water. “It helps that as a business, you’re not immediately exposed to hundreds of thousands of people,” says Johnston, who's based in New York. “It’s a slow scaling process.”

Gradual growth turned out to be just what JetBlue needed on Twitter, as it gave the company time to learn what worked and what didn’t. Chatty posts and customer service assistance tended to generate a lot of replies and new followers. Press releases announcements were met with silence.

From this experience, Johnston hit on what he calls the Twitter “kernel of truth”: be receptive to what your followers want. How do you know what that is? You can gauge their responses to your tweets, and—as it turns out—you can also ask them.

When JetBlue faced dead air after pushing out new route announcements, Johnston started wondering what people wanted from the account. So he asked. The responses surprised him. “People said simply, ‘This is what we want. We want to see you asking.’” He adds that people even went as far as to say that they wanted the company to see them as a resource for helping JetBlue deliver a better product.

Scaling up

Johnston started using the account to ask questions and to post questions and info that people clearly responded to. He also used it quite a bit for customer service—much of which other people don't see because it happens via direct messages (Twitter’s private channel).

That approach has helped @JetBlue draw followers, and today, Johnston is assembling a team to maintain the account. In addition to the half dozen staffers who can post directly to the Twitter account, he’s identified key people in departments across the company who can answer questions. Often, for scheduled events, like the announcement of a new policy that might generate a lot of questions, he lines up the right people to help ahead of time.

That kind of preparation has helped JetBlue scale up. The next challenge is to staff the account 24/7, so that travelers at any time can get a quick reply.

Tearing down the walls

Meantime, the company is pleased with what was initially an experiment. Johnston says that for JetBlue, the success is largely about qualitative rather than quantitative improvements:

Our routes mean we’re really susceptible to weather issues, so if there’s a rash of delays, I can say, “Heads up, everybody.” When travelers have more knowledge, it helps them keep calm. That affects their dealings with people in the airports, which reflects back to them. It can change the dynamics in the airport, and that makes all of our lives a lot easier.

In addition, Johnston believes there’s value in personalizing the brand.

“That’s a clichéd phrase, but Twitter really is about tearing down the artificial walls between customers and the individuals who work at companies.”