SoFly

SoFly: JetBlue's Social Media World

It's no surprise that JetBlue has a strong social media presence, part of its target demographic is younger customers. JetBlue has been able to muster a really great tie-in between the customer experience and the company culture through the SoFly program. SoFly acts as a place where JetBlue can share random information, from their service awards to their plane tail designs to interesting statistics. It's also made of customers' social media contributions from destinations, airports, and experiences. These come in the form of tips, Instragrams, and recommendations for food, amenities, and hotels. 

This presents an unprecedented opportunity for customers to truly interact and have an ongoing conversation with an airline. Choice submissions that use such hashtags as #sofly or #jetblue get placed on the SoFly page where they can be seen by everyone. It's a great opportunity to increase your social media account's traffic and just plain cool. It's dynamic, responsive, and customer driven. These are then available to share again on Facebook, re-tweet on Twitter, etc.

An example of an Instragram picture added to SoFly.

At its core, SoFly is an aggregation of all JetBlue social media onto the main website. It's not a revolutionary idea, but goes a long way to truly tie together the experience of planning, traveling, and booking budget flights with JetBlue. No other airline has deployed as sleek, functional, and enjoyable social media experience in this way. SoFly allows customers to be proud of JetBlue and for JetBlue to show off how great of a company they are as well. It'll be interesting to see how this evolves over time and if any other cheap airlines, let alone the big players, adopt a similar program in the future. This is a great first step in improving the chasm that has developed over the year between an airline and its customers having a natural and satisfying dialogue.

Guide to Blue Badges Part II

TrueBlue Badges Part II

In the introduction to badges, I detailed how to sign up and start getting some of your first badges and over 1,000 TrueBlue points in just a few minutes. This next installment will cover earning your next 4 badges, making a total of 10, and getting to level 3. 

The Next Four Badges

The next four badges aren't a whole lot harder than the first six and you can do them without the help of anyone else (later on you'll need some friends' on social media) and without spending any money. The badges we're going after this time are the Recruiter, Leader, On the Map, and In A Badge Mood. What I really love about these is that JetBlue really makes an effort to make them accessible, fun, easy, and logical. Again, you'll need some basic social media accounts to take advantage of these, but that's it!

That's a total of 10 badges unlocked without a lot of effort with almost 2,000 TrueBlue points to show for it. From here on out the badges will take a little more work to acquire and levels will come into play as restrictions for earning better badges, but there are still a lot of ways to score more points without having to fly a single mile. Check out the next installment for more info on the remaining badges that can get you free miles without spending a cent!

- John

Guide to Blue Badges - Part I

Introduction to Badges

One of the interesting aspects of JetBlue's loyalty program is the badge system. You can earn badges and levels much like in FourSquare and similar check-in apps by performing social media tasks, being a customer of partner companies, or just flying per usual. These can net you free points towards JetBlue flights and easily push you over the 5k or 10k needed for a free flight! I'll go over the basics to get you started in this post and later installments will be guides to getting the most free points possible.

Signing Up

Signing up is easy - just head to the JetBlue badges page and login with your TrueBlue account.

Getting Badges

Your first badges are going to be pretty easy - you can get over 1,000 TrueBlue points for just a few minutes of work! Here are the first badges you'll be earning to be 20% of the way towards a free flight:

The first badges that are available to earn.

The First Badges

There you go, 1050 points for just a few minutes of work. There are many more badges to be unlocked that I will cover later, but this will get you started and on your way to racking up those extra points. 

- John