The True ROI On Blogging And Social Media

I about fell out of my chair when I read this article at Adweek at the amount of money the Ding Widget has made Southwest. $150 Million in ticket sales.

In its first two years, the Ding application was downloaded by about 2 million consumers and generated more than $150 million in ticket sales, said Kevin Krone, vice president of marketing. While Southwest has been steadily increasing its Ding promotions with e-mail, direct mail and TV advertising, the most effective marketing method has been word-of-mouth referrals, said Krone. "The ratio of referred [Ding] installers to total installers is very high, which tells us that people who download the program often convince their friends to do it as well," he said.

Now that's a widget worth building. But it's more than that. Southwest also has one of the gold standards in corporate blogs with NutzAboutSouthwest. They average 20 comments a day (substantive comments), and when you get them on the phone, they are the nicest people you can imagine. A recent chat with one of my clients revealed a Southwest Airlines marketing employee offering advice to other corporate bloggers with no strings attached.

They love blogging, and want to evangelize it. That's pretty good.

As for my personal experiences - I lost an iPod nano on a Southwest flight a couple of months ago and posted about it here on Brandstorming.

Southwest sent me a thank you letter for writing about their service. It's called online monitoring, and it left me feeling pretty good about them (of course, it was lost in the data crash, but I swear it existed).

Thanks Southwest. I needed that final bullet point for my next client presentation.

hattip: Richard Becker