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S
hel Holtz’s post today — “Hearing from road warriors like you” — on U.S. airline jetBlue and their clever piece of evangelist marketing (as in, get the product evangelists to market for you, for free) ties in, of course, with the idea of open source marketing.
Says Shel:
So I was delighted to read Cody’s account of jetBlue’s word-of-mouth campaign that involves the installation of “story booths” in major airports jetBlue serves. According to Cody:
At the futuristic-looking booths, a virtual jetBlue crew member will guide passengers as they enter their stories. There will also be simple postcards handed out and mailed to JetBlue customers asking them to share their experience stories.
I’d do that. I’d sit in that booth and tell my story. Since the campaign includes using the war stories of real travelers, my tale could end up as part of a TV commercial or some other formal communication.
Cody stacks this concept against the popular and typical celebrity endorsement approach. In an era where (as the Edelman Trust Barometer has shown) people trust others like them more than they trust institutions, it makes sense to have road warriors like you tell stories that will make you want to use the same service.
Hey, there are products that I’d do that for, too (and in fact have done; it’s just that one of them let me down badly so the next product, service or company I evangelise will have to be ‘doubly’ good before I’ll risk my reputation again).
Organised and semi-controlled ‘Customer word-of-mouth evangelising’ is a radical idea that has come of time.
Let the customers who love your product become your unofficial marketing department. And work hard to both not annoy them and to assist them in whatever transparent and open way you can to grow more evangelists.
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Puppy! It’s the default tag in the Mac version of Ecto, and half the time, even when I change it before posting, it’s what comes up. The Windows version has no placeholder word, which I prefer. But there you go.
Ha! I was wondering… what a bizarre tag — but then again, GreatNews ships with a feed about dogs on Flikr. Good job we are dog lovers, hey mate?!