Taking to the skies with groundswell and JetBlue

Fasten your seat belts and set your electronic devises to airplane mode. Now set them back to normal and send a tweet! For the airline JetBlue interacting with their customers and establishing a sense of community is important for setting their brand apart. The scrappy airline may not be the largest in the United States but it's wiliness to embrace the groundswell has established it as a pioneer on social media. As Li and Bernoff state in the book by embracing the groundswell innovation moves quickly. JetBlue's forward thinking has propelled the company to stand out in terms of their customer service and desire to receive feedback.


JetBlue's slogan "You Above All" emphasizes their devotion to the customer

The "Inspiring Humanity" campaign

A self aware company is a successful company because it shows that they are actively trying to improve in areas where they could be lacking. For JetBlue, connecting with customers is as vital to their success as the actual service they deliver. "We call ourselves a customer service company the happens to fly planes," says Laurie Meacham who is JetBlue's Manager of Customer Commitment. With this kind of attitude it only makes sense that Twitter would be used heavily by JetBlue as another platform to reach out to customers and tap into the groundswell.

Like Li and Bernoff stated in chapter 10, when it comes to Twitter once your company starts to connect, people will expect the company to listen and respond, not just broadcast. JetBlue doesn't just meet these standards they exceed them and offer a textbook performance of how a company should connect with its costumers on Twitter.


An example of JetBlue's impressive response time

JetBlue prides themselves on responding to most customers

JetBlue is responsive, friendly, helpful, and they are determined to make everyone's input appear valued and heard. Their ability to respond quickly and be on top of feedback from the groundswell has a lot to do with the corporate culture of JetBlue. The culture of the company is driven to not just preform admirable as an airline, but to do so with the customers best interest in mind. Striving to listen, change, and improve based on costumer feedback was not a process that was mastered overnight by JetBlue. It took time and small steps in the right direction in order to become the success they are today.

Starting the groundswell from within in order to properly embrace the groundswell of the costumers is an essential part of the process. With the corporate culture in mind JetBlue first needed to make the mental shift in order to let people adjust to how things should be done. Next they had to support the strategies needed to take their organization to the desired location. Finally they had to gain executive support for their change.  Although JetBlue emphasizes customer support, new ideas and changes like their immersed expansion into something like Twitter had to be worked on in-house before they could take it to the next level with the outside groundswell.

Fostering professional growth for their "crewmembers" is vital for JetBlue because happy and successful employees bring better ideas and motivation when they feel more embraced by the place they work for. It's true for pretty much every organization that when you encourage and listen to employees they reward the company with loyalty and enthusiasm. JetBlue helps to promote engagement among it's employees through their corporate citizenship programs. These programs are JetBlue's way of promoting groundswell from inside their company. Usually the bigger a company is the more challenging internal communication can become, but for a company like JetBlue this is not an issue. Listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing are all objectives that are applied by JetBlue through their employee programs. They all fall in line with what Li and Bernoff determine to be necessary for a program's success.