twopointouch

Quick report from last Friday’s Fuel conference. It was a well-planned day which I thoroughly enjoyed, so well done to Ryan, Keir and the Carsonified team. It was also good to meet up again with a couple of fellow bloggers. Andrew from Imagination has written already about the attention to detail shown in the design of the delegate badges, while Vero has covered off the presentation from the lovely bearded chap from Innocent drinks.

For me, the stand-out presentation was the case study regarding the launch of Virgin America, a new internal airline for the States and part of the Virgin group. It was founded in 2004 and started flying in September 2007. How come the launch took over three years?

As the presenter, Alex Hunter (Virgin’s Head of Group Online Marketing), pointed out, you might imagine that this would be a piece of cake. Virgin is a massive international brand. The group’s Virgin Atlantic service is well-known for being good quality and reasonably priced.

Not so. In some respects, the brand’s fame worked against them. The proposed launch met with loud protests to the US Department of Transport from the existing internal carriers. Virgin was a foreign company, they argued. Allowing them to launch would directly damage US businesses. It appeared (quite rightly) that a lengthy fight would ensue.

Virgin was hamstrung in two ways during this period. They couldn’t unveil the new planes’ impressive features and specifications - for all they knew, they’d be completely out-of-date by the time they launched. Nor could they use Richard Branson as a brand ambassador - his nationality was exactly the reason for which they were facing problems from the DoT. Also, money was more of an issue than you might imagine: they had already bought the planes and empty planes are a very expensive liability.

Legal fencing, defencing, shilly-shallying and fence-sitting ensued, for months. Finally, on December 26 2006, the DoT delivered its verdict: Virgin America would not be allowed to fly. This was a black day for Alex and the company. To that date, the Department had never reversed its decision on such a matter.

So Virgin decided to take the fight to the (metaphorical) streets.

They submitted a time-lapse video of one of the planes being painted to YouTube. Over the weekend, it garnered 200,000 views and found its way to the front page of digg. It wasn’t an especially remarkable film from a technical perspective, though at that time, there was nothing like it (all their rivals have since copied the idea, apparently).

They launched a blog called Let VA Fly (now defunct), unveiling all the sophisticated new features on their planes. At this point, they felt they had nothing to lose, so they might as well. They included an online petition, and forms which would create and send a correctly worded and legally valid complaint to individual users’ representatives, senators and the Department of Transport. Technically, it was a fairly simple site, based on open source Wordpress software. But it did the job.

Perhaps because the incumbent US internal airlines are so very terrible and anything better sounded like Nirvana, perhaps because it was pitched as a classic David and Goliath story, the blog was a great success.

They decided to launch a competition to let readers name the first eight planes, then capitalised on this by specifically inviting blogosphere celebrities and idols, Stephen Colbert and Cory Doctorow, to name two (Air Colbert and Unicorn Chaser, since you asked). They created T-shirts and gave them away. They put one of their planes into the San Francisco Valentine’s parade.

Perhaps crucially, they managed to get other online communities to do much of the marketing of the site, and driving people to sign the petition and send form letters, for them. The site or posts on the site hit the front page of digg eight times. Realising that community was clearly sympathetic, they invited Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht to film their diggnation video cast on board one of the grounded planes, driving scads of geek traffic to the site. Later paid and unpaid spots on diggnation worked equally well.

In total, 75,000 letters were sent to the authorities and 30,000 people signed the petition. It was enough. In September last year, the DoT reversed its decision and the service took off.

What did I expect when I called Robert Scoble, perhaps the best-known blogger to have become famous for blogging? I wasn’t sure. Maybe someone very Californian. In the bad way.

Anyway, he isn’t. Yes, he’s laid-back and he did use the expression ‘real good’. We only had a short conversation, but I can imagine him being a big hugger. I like that sometimes, though. Anyway, I was disarmed. He seems to be a charming man. Actually, I’ve been really lucky so far, and only a couple of my Web 2.0 interviews have been with people who turned my flesh. Bottom line? You try to knock the scobleizer and you go through me first. Also, cheers to Robert for doing a live interview after the recent debate on the subject.

So what got you into blogging?

Back in 2000, I used to work as a conference organiser for a tech company and I was asking all the speakers what the sessions should be about. Quite a lot of them said ‘blogging’. At that point, I had no idea what that meant. *laughs* I went and Googled it, and there seemed to only be about 150-200 blogs out there.

Lanjut →

In what may be a PR masterpiece, the new Yahoo! corporate blog is nothing but self-effacing. My headline is theirs for their virgin entry. “Oh, yes, we’re going corporate. But please don’t hold that against us. It’s a good thing, really,” they go on to say.

Signs are that this will be an interesting read. Major corporate + apparent humility = addictive qualities. Check out this quotation from the first line of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s latest blog entry from Sunday: “I had lunch with Tony Blair today. (And yes, I have been waiting all afternoon to type that.)”

How cool is that? He’s a big shot, but he’s just like you and me. He remains respectful throughout the entry to both the reader and to Blair. It’s good for me as a reader and him as the main conduit for communications between me and Sun. That’s because his opening remarks mean I might actually want to read what he’s got to say on the subject. He’s established himself as a human being with the same frailties as you and me, before he does anything else.

OK. Because I’m researching this stuff, I started a MySpace page. I know it’s not really aimed at misanthropes with beer bellies, but I thought I needed to do it, eat my own dog food, etc.

So it’s been a few weeks now. Me and my friend Tom Anderson have been getting along fine. It’s a fairly unusual friendship - I’d say we have a silent understanding. The system imported my address book to start and sent some people messages. I never got one back, but I assumed they’d also started MySpace pages to test it out, like me.

So I was surprised and excited to get an email saying that “kelli” wanted to be my friend last week. Who’s kelli, I wondered? I don’t know any err… kellis. Better have a look at her profile. Californian 23-year-old, with 80 friends, eh? I didn’t recognise her, but I found several links to her other site, which was [NSFW] here.

Ah. My new friend wants me to pay for explicit pictures and cybersexual instant messaging with her. This must be what Pete Cashmore and the others call the MySpace Economy.