FreshNetworks Blog

Virgin America is giving away free flights to social media influencers it has identified on Twitter. There is (it assures us) no catch. It has used Klout, a tool which analyses influence on Twitter, to identify influential people in the Toronto area and offered them free flights on its new services to Los Angeles and San Francisco. These influencers only have to pay taxes. They are not being asked to do anything in return for this. They are just being asked to enjoy a flight, free Wi-Fi onboard and a launch party in Toronto.

This is an interesting social media strategy. Typically examples of blogger and Twitter outreach have seen brands ask them to do something in exchange for free product or experiences. They might offer them something for free or invite them to an event, for example, but would ask them to cover it on their blogs, on Twitter, take and share photos or recruit their friends to discussions. Virgin America’s approach is refreshingly different. And also refreshingly clever.

It is often a shame when brands dictate what they want bloggers and Twitter users to do when they engage with them. Usually they have not understood what each of these influencers is looking to achieve with their blog or with their followers. A successful social media outreach strategy will treat each of these influencers as individuals, recognise that they are interested in different things and allow them to use their involvement with your brand to further their own blog or social media aims. For example, if I write a design blog, I might want to review the interior design and lighting on Virgin America flights. If I am a plane fan, I might compare the airline with competitors. And if I am a small business owner, I might review the offering from a business perspective, looking at cost and ability to work onboard. Each influencer wants to talk about different things in different ways.

With this in mind, there are two ways to work with influencers online as a brand:

1. Research each influencer and treat them as individuals – building a relationship with them and understanding their interests, their aims and what you can offer them or ask them to do that will help them as individual bloggers or Twitter users
2. Enable influencers to experience your brand or service and trust them to cover it as they so choose. You focus on giving them an experience they will enjoy and allow them to write and cover the experience in a way that works for them. Of course they may not write at all about your brand – although if you choose carefully people typically will.

The second of these is the braver option as brands will feel that they lose control over what may be written about them. In many cases, however, it can be the cleverer option. As in Virgin America’s case – give influencers an experience that you know is good and trust them to cover it in any way they choose.

I’ve spent the last ten days with no Internet and very little access to English-language news sources. On my return I turned to my three favourite sources for getting up to speed quickly on what’s been happening: BBC News, Twitter and Google. The first of these for an overview of what had happened and the last two to really delve into some depth, to find out what people have been saying and to see what’s really been happening.

It turns out I missed a lot.

Only a few years ago, my main source of information on anything from the events in Iran, to the events in Los Angeles would have been a printed newspaper or magazine. I could have picked up one of the weeklies at Heathrow airport on Sunday and found out most of what there was for me to find out on the journey home. Today things are very different. There’s a vast array of information out there from news outlets to people like you and me. People who might (at least claim that they) know more than the new outlets, or at least are more willing to tell us.

Both the aftermath of the Iran election and the death of Michael Jackson have highlighted the role that users can play in generating  news content. Keeping us up-to-date on what they are seeing, hearing and thinking. And often doing this more quickly than traditional news sources. The way we find out about what is happening is now quicker than ever  before.

Speed of reporting is important for news and has been the focus of many important developments. The Crimean war in the 1850s saw the arrival of reporting that must have felt to readers of the day like ‘real-time’ updates. For the first time, electric telegraph enabled news to travel across Europe in hours and not weeks. People could find out what was happening at the Front. This was a real revolution. The increased speed at which we could get news and reporting changed what people wrote about and how they wrote about it – the birth of the ‘embedded’ journalist with the troops. This was the first time people could hear about battles and what was happening in the war whilst they were still pertinent. People felt they knew more and knew more quickly. They felt like they could change things.

And the use of user-generated news is bringing similar changes thanks to the speed at which it is letting people tell us what they are seeing and hearing. This is changing the kind of news we are exposed to. Whereas previously we would see reports that a journalist had crafted and would assess how much credit we gave to that particular journalist, source or publication. We are now getting snippets of information from multiple sources and each time  have to assess what we think about that source and that piece of information. The many thousands of comments an news-snippets on Twitter about Iran or Michael Jackson need to be evaluated  – which do we trust (and why); which are we interested in find out more about (and why); which snippets when put together give us a fuller picture of events (and why).

There is a danger with this kind of news. A danger that people will question less and that things that are not true or have less critical appraisal will start to influence what we think and what we do. I’m more optimistic. I think that the  massive growth in real-time news will make us be more critical and help teach us to process this new kind of information – taking in more from a wider range of sources and filtering out what we don’t trust and query things by looking for other sources. This has to be a good thing.

And of course it means that we will get this information quicker than ever before. What this means for traditional news outlets is probably another story…

Some more reading

• Michael Jackson: Information Overload (geeksaresexy.net)
• Web slows after Jackson’s death (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Twitter and the news cycle, perfect together (ethanzuckerman.com)