Last week I have seen an article at Advertising Age about JetBlue providing certain YouTube bloggers and twitterers free tickets and complimentary vacations in order to motivate them to blog and tweet about their new services.
The article goes on to say that “[i]n a bid to build buzz for its new routes from New York’s JFK and Boston’s Logan International to LAX, the airline is counting on a stream of tweets and videos produced by Howcast and YouTube stars such as Kevin Nalts, Delphine Dijon, Justine Ezarik and Meghan Asha. To facilitate that, JetBlue is using its one plane with wireless internet access, BetaBlue, for the JFK-to-LAX flight.”
This is a strategy to promote JetBlue’s new service BetaBlue, which enables the passengers to use their BlackBerry, laptop and other devices to connect to the internet and at the same time enjoy unlimited beverage and snack services. This is a revolutionary service that is going to change the whole experience of a flight and the time consumed during that flight.
On the other hand, this strategy also proved an idea that was appearing to me for sometime that the individual bloggers and twitterers, who have a certain audience, are becoming a sort of marketing authorities who professionally or voluntarily are promoting products, services and brands.
Individual bloggers, re-bloggers and twitterers [including myself] have turned into marketers of sorts for sometime, while claiming to provide the most innovative and the newest information [especially in design, art, technology, advertising and other creative stuff that are hot in the virtual domain], they also lend their blogs and tweets to the pandemic of viral marketing. And this has become more than apparent with this final marketing campaign of JetBlue.
Now is the time for viral marketing and the blogger and the twitterer have taken their place as the ultimate tool of brands. There used to be marketers who knocked on our doors since the 50′s but now we visit them through Google Reader and other means to see who likes what and promotes for which reason. Then choose the one which was blogged the most.
This also changed the nature of advertising. Now, the advertisers are targeting focus groups. Those focus groups include people, who use internet excessively, making lots of research about what to share with other people, what to blog and tweet about. In return, those bloggers and twitterers make a reputation through those tweets and blogposts, while at the same time marketing and advertising the product or services that they issue. That reputation brings them more readers and daily hits, which gives them the chance to create their own blog as a brand.
