Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Virgin America (or @VirginAmerica to those of you on Twitter), decided to crowdsource “viral” ideas to grow their presence among Twitter users. We thought it would be a fun exercise… but hey, we are supposed to get paid for this sort of advice/consulting/creative brainstorming!! So we decided we’d post a handful of ideas here (10, in fact!), then post a “tweet” to our Twitter account with a link to our ideas!

1. VirginAmerica “Hashtag” - Allow consumers to tweet things they’ve never done but always wanted to do… that is, they are “virgins” of (for example: I’ve always wanted to skydive #VirginAmerica).  Within means, Virgin will pick winners randomly and fly them to a destination where they get to do whatever is they’ve never tried.

2. HFWIF? (How far will it fly) - Tweet a HFWIF message once per week containing some nugget of insight into Virgin’s ‘spectacular’ service. Every Twitter user who retweets is entered to win Elevate miles.  So the tweet ‘flies’ through the twittersphere… if that’s even possible to measure Then DM some code to redeem the miles.

3. TweetSeat! – Tweet your flight/seat # and locate your to-be in-flight neighbors via Twitter

4. VirginAmerica Word Association Game – Play a fun word association game for new followers (say a VA tag word – new follower can @ reply with what it first conjures in their mind) x # of people who play win something

5. Virgin = _____  - have people fill in the blank @ virgin america, give out elevate miles or free drinks for creative answers

6. New Twitter Geo-tag - What if there’s some new kind of tag for location like:

Having lunch in [Paris, France] with @myfriend

Then you can geocode it. Create a mashup like TwitterVision, but only take locations from tweets (versus users’ profile location)

7. Where in the world is…? - have people do some Where’s Waldo type of search based off of clues Virgin puts out about ‘where they are’ that day

8. Elevate Your Followers - Randomly give out Elevate miles for every x # of new followers

9. RED-commendations – Have people nominate songs and then vote for additions to the RED system

10. Conversation Starters - Have fun hypothetical seat chat sessions (playing off their in-flight conversation starters) – give away Elevate miles

To our friends at Virgin America, we’ll assume that our check is in the mail? Or at least how about some Twitter love!

You can follow us on Twitter at @Affinitive, or go to www.twitter.com/affinitive (you can follow me at @BobTroia. Thanks to @sarahashley, @patrickcourtney, and @tomkincaid!)