Dear fellow aviation and branding enthusiasts,

As many of you might be aware, I’ve been at Ft. Lauderdale in Florida today for a keynote presentation at the FTMA/Freddies Conference on the topic I love the most – airline branding and social media. I’ve just done the presentation and received a phenomenal response to it. And I’m sharing it with you here (with the videos included). I’d love to have your inputs too.

P.S: I’ll be Live Tweeting from the Freddie Awards about this year’s winners and you can follow me on Twitter here.
Airlines 2.0 – How airlines can use Web 2.0 for branding
View more presentations from Shashank Nigam.

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In my recent webinar on airline branding, I used the examples of JetBlue Airways to demonstrate how an airline can successfully adopt a holistic Web 2.0 branding strategy. A number of webinar participants wanted to learn more about it, so I got to the heart of the matter.

So that you could hear it from the horse’s mouth, I got in touch with Morgan Johnston, who leads the Twitter initiative at JetBlue Corporate Communications. This is the same Morgan who famously started “following” the popular blogger Jonathan Fields, who got freaked out and wrote a story about it.

Here is an email interview with Morgan, regarding JetBlue’s digital branding strategy and a good behind-the-scenes look at how JetBlue does it.

SimpliFlying: Who’s the driving force behind the technology initiatives at JetBlue, and how big is the team?

Morgan: Responsibility for our online initiatives span many groups, from our brand, sales, or web teams, to corporate communications, or customer service.  We each have different requirements and ideas that we bring forward to create an …

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In December last year, as major retailers in the US worried about “Black Friday” not arriving and cash registers not ringing, Amazon.com announced that it had its best year ever. Here’s the story and here are the numbers: Amazon reported that the buying was strongest on December 15 when they received 6.3 million orders, which according to the Dow Jones translates to a “record 72.9 items a second.” And this is not the first time Amazon has bucked the recessionary trend.
Amazon’s brand matters
The reason for Amazon’s success? It’s the Amazon brand that has done the work here. Had Amazon not established strong brand loyalty in good times, the customers wouldn’t have stood by it in bad times.  More importantly, everything about Amazon is based around customer experience, and everything is marketed to the customer well.

So what can airlines learn from the Amazon brand, to beat the recession? Here are three key lessons.
1. Build a distinct airline brand
If Amazon hadn’t established …

 Recently, I was honored to have been interviewed on the very popular Airplane Geeks podcast. The topic was airline branding (what else!) and I had a lot of fun with Courtney and Max - the two certifiable aviation geeks who host the show. You can listen to the whole hour long show by clicking on the “play” button below, or just download my interview from the show here.

Good news for SimpliFlying, and some thanks
Recently, SimpliFlying has been mentioned on a number of websites. Specifically, Popagandhi, 30,000 feet and Bangalore Aviation. Thanks a lot Adrianna, Max and Devesh.

Compliments and feedback have been flooding in after my recent webinar on airline branding. I’d like to specifically thank Jeff Ogden, from Hospitality Interactive Marketing, New York, for inviting me to lead the seminar series and organizing it so professionally. It’s been my best remote-working experience till date.

Thanks for everything guys, and cheers to a great 2009 ahead!

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What a year it has been for the airline industry! It started out in high spirits, until oil prices reached $160 per barrel and claimed airlines globally in its wake. And now, oil prices are predicted to go down to $20! In the midst of all this, some airlines took extreme measures that eroded brand equity, for short-term gain, while some persisted. Only time will tell which will emerge stronger from the recession, though my bets are on the latter.

So, let’s close the year by sharing with you the ten most popular (=most read) SimpliFlying articles of 2008. These actually give a good overview of the year for the industry too. From the great branding practices of Virgin America and lessons for airline from Barack “Change” Obama, to the brilliant Emirates A380 show put up during the first flight to New York. To top it off, the year ended with Qantas and BA going into merger talks.  I’m sure you’ll enjoy revisiting these articles, as much as I enjoyed writing …