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"JetBlue is one of the top airlines associated with the web. Partially, that's because the brand is so new: Created just 10 years ago, JetBlue came of age when the Internet was already fairly developed. As Marty St. George, senior vice president of marketing for JetBlue explains, that means the company needs to do most of its outreach via digital media. Since the goal of most of that outreach is to get consumers to log on to jetblue.com, a lot of that buy revolves around search and banner ads. \nWhen it comes to social media, it's less about direct sales and more about brand building, and JetBlue has embraced it with gusto. St. George caused a stir last year when he challenged ad agencies interested in working with the brand to look him up on Twitter. \nAt this writing, JetBlue has 1.6 million followers on Twitter, which is more than any other airline, and about 500,000 fans on Facebook, which is the highest in the industry next to Southwest Airlines. Following its \"go where your customers are\" philosophy, JetBlue has recently tried its hand at location-based services and is planning to release a smartphone app this year. Mashable recently spoke with St. George about his views on social media, price-conscious customers and the airline's handling of the very public meltdown of flight attendant Steven Slater last summer. Below are some excerpts of that conversation.\nQ&amp;A With Marty St. George, Senior Vice President, Marketing, JetBlue\n\nI first heard about you when Advertising Age ran a story about you saying that you were telling ad agencies who were interested in working with JetBlue to find you on Twitter. Why did you put so much emphasis on Twitter at that point and how do you feel about it today?\nWell, I don't feel that was a totally fair description of the tweet. What I was trying to communicate was we're not a traditional brand. Most of the agencies we went to had a very old school view of how advertising worked. There were some that sort of set up this concept within their company of the digital silo or the digital strategy team. And really, for JetBlue, none of those worked very well, because we have fundamentally a digital brand in that the overwhelming majority of customers come through jetblue.com. From that perspective, it was important that agencies knew that they couldn't come and approach us like a typical [consumer packaged goods brand] or a car company. As far as the tweet: I think it was \"it would be interesting to see how many [agencies] find me on Twitter.\" We had already come up with a list of those who had the RFPs, though I could have the timing wrong. But I think the important thing was we really wanted agencies who understood what it meant to work with a brand like JetBlue. I won't name agencies, but we had a couple of agencies who talked about how adept they were on Facebook and how incredible they were on Twitter, and one of the agencies \u2014 it wasn't probably a day after we met with them \u2014 I started getting follows from people in the agencies and they were all from accounts that were created in the last two or three days. \n\n\n\n\nWhat role does social media play for people who are looking to book a flight? Do a lot of people go on Facebook and ask \"What airline do you use?\" and that sort of thing?\nIt's funny, when I describe the overall pathway that JetBlue wants to follow, it all does tie in with getting people to go to jetblue.com to book. That's why we spend money on SEO and display ads and other ways to get people to click through. If you look at the social media silos of Facebook and Twitter, that's really not where those channels are right now. I think that the opportunity is to build the brand. Our ability to listen to our customers in social media and to learn from them and have a one-to-one communication with them \u2014 we think that's an incredible brand builder. It's not really only about getting people to jetblue.com. However, if you have a good feeling about the brand, we certainly hope that it will translate to sales.\nI'm curious if you've done anything with Facebook's Sponsored Stories?\n\n\n\n\nNot yet, but we are doing some things with Facebook Places. What Places is doing for us is it's an opportunity to put the geographical side into it. Customers can check in to JetBlue locations around the system. They get TrueBlue points and discount offers. \nSo Facebook Places is your platform of choice? Why not Foursquare or one of those companies?\nWe're open to working with a lot of different companies. I'm not saying we'd never do anything with Foursquare. We're not working with them right now. I think it's a bigger question about the channels that customers want to use and Facebook has significantly more penetration than Foursquare.\nAren't a lot of travelers primarily motivated by price? Isn't there a portion of the market that will go with whatever's cheapest on one of the aggregation sites like Orbitz? What size of the market is that and do you just write off that market?\nWe do market segmentation and we realize that there's a portion of the market that's only motivated by price. Those customers are not a target for us. We'll carry them when the price is low enough, but those are not customers we target.\nWhat size of the market is that? Fifty percent?\nThat's not something we've talked about publicly, but believe me it's not 2%, but it's less than 50%.\nWhat role does traditional advertising play in your media mix? Do you see a day when all your marketing communication is 100% digital?\nWe recognize we can't get 100% digital, so we do a lot of traditional media, we do a lot of outdoor, we do some radio. We're doing just now what I'd call an experiment in television and we'll see how that goes. We spend the majority of our resources on digital, but it's not 90%.\nHow about mobile?\nWe are not doing a lot of advertising on mobile. We are in the midst of development for our smartphone app, which, fingers crossed, will be coming out later this year. The main reason we're not focusing on mobile advertising right now is that when we look at the purchase cycle, when you're in that mobile mindset, you're not thinking about buying air travel. I have full expectations that that will transition, not even as the years move forward, but just as we move forward.\nSteve Slater was all over the news about a year ago and you chose to blog about it. Are you satisfied that was the best approach?\nI think a lot of the communication around Steve Slater really tied back to our brand values. The company has high brand values when we have to make decisions like this, they go through a lot of filters \u2014 caring, integrity, fun, passion. We did not talk initially about Steven Slater because we didn't know the story. Once we knew the story, we started talking about it on the blog. It wasn't just a channel choice. That's where our customers are. Our customers are younger, they're more affluent and they're significantly more active in the digital space and we want to be where the customers are.\nMore Marketing Resources from Mashable:\n- Why Cross-Channel Messaging Is Crucial to Reaching New Consumers- HOW TO: Sync Your Online and Offline Marketing Campaigns- 3 Facebook Mobile Trends to Watch This Year- 5 YouTube Marketing Tips for Better Engagement- 6 Tips for Creating Valuable Branded Content\nImage courtesy of Flickr, Kubrak78"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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