The power of social media for mass notification

Social networks are powerful tools, especially when it comes to mass notification. To illustrate this point, let’s look at a recent holiday promotion from WestJet.

During this promotion, WestJet employees collected Christmas presents for airline passengers before their flights departed, and delivered these gifts upon their arrival. WestJet created a YouTube video for the promotion that quickly went viral, and you can check out the video here.

Social media is important for getting the word out quickly. Twitter, Instagram, and various social networks make it easy for organizations to share important information with large groups of people, and can have a major effect on an organization.

For example, WestJet’s original goal was to get 250,000 YouTube views. To date, the YouTube video has already been viewed more than 32 million times, and will no doubt double or triple this number.

Why is this holiday promotion important? WestJet’s ability to launch this promotion is significant – not just the video, not the enormous logistics, not the employees giving their all, not the opportunity for viral promotion. All of that of course is part of it, but the biggest challenge as I see it was the internal job of driving the initial executive support to dedicate the resources necessary to accomplish this collaborative effort.

I will admit, this is one of the first viral videos that brought tears to my eyes. Are there greater issues in the world than the delivery of presents on a baggage carousel? Of course. Is there time this holiday season to appreciate what was an enormous effort by many people, with much to risk, and to see it delivered flawlessly in the end? I had tears in my eyes not because people got what they wanted for Christmas; I experienced such emotion because people worked together to deliver something special and unexpected this holiday season.

Like a well-executed social media promotion, mass notification requires a team effort. The power of a well-executed social networking promotion is here for you to see – one of the finest of its kind. Try to see behind the final video (which is awesome) and consider how your organization can benefit by the non-standard use of social networks to accomplish something amazing.