Latest on airline social media marketing: Vueling leveraging the Instagram craze

Your Instagram pictures could soon be on a Vueling A320.

It is hardly news that airlines, as most consumer-oriented companies, are embracing social media to connect with the public, sell plane tickets or sort out crisis. Some go the extra-mile and even develop their own innovative applications exploring the social travel space (whether successfully or not is another matter, the jury is still out)...But the key element here is that the hyperconnected world we live in provides also a platform to test new marketing and leverage user-generated content...I mentioned in a previous blog post that "visual" is the word of the day and the recent billion-dollar sale of Instagram to Facebook proves the point...

So what best than try riding the Instagram wave? This is what Vueling is doing with its latest campaign, the Vueling Air Gallery (running on Facebook, of course!)...take an Instagram picture from one of Vueling's destinations, tag it #vuelingairgallery and get the public to vote for it (obviosuly the goal is to make it viral by asking your friends to vote for your picture). One of Vueling's Airbus A320s is going to be painted with the 200 best pictures and the best 50 Vueling instagrammers (chosen by some judges) are going to get free flights too..

To be fair, this is not the first time that an airliners has been decorated this way, KLM already painted one of its aircraft with its fan's Facebook pictures styled as blue Delft porcelain tiles...but it is a nice and engaging initiative nonetheless...I am actually wondering why we do not see more campaigns along these lines.