via Social-Times:
It all began with a tweet and ended with a whole bunch of happy customers, a KLM in flight dance party 10km above ground and a Guinness World Record. When KLM Royal Dutch Airlines announced that they would be opening a non-stop route from Amsterdam to Miami on March 27, 2011, Dutch DJ Seid van Riel and Producer Wilco Jung tweeted KLM asking them to move their inaugural flight up a week so that they could attend a huge music festival in Miami. KLM tweeted back a challenge: If Seid and Wilco could get enough people to fill the plane then KLM would reschedule the flight. They filled it within a couple of hours and the rest is history.
A video about the #Fly2Miami campaign went up on the KLM YouTube channel earlier this week. The video includes footage from the massive party that went down on the plane, which earned the flight a Guinness Record for the highest altitude dance party—ten kilometers above sea level, as well as interviews with DJ Seid van Riel and Wilco Jung, whose tweets got this whole thing started.
Van Riel says that as a big established company he never would have expected KLM to react to his tweet the way that they did, especially considering that he and his friends on the flight are made up of a younger crowd. I don’t think that Van Riel was the only one who was surprised. This was not only a first for KLM, but was the first time in history that any airline had changed a flight schedule as a result of a customer request on Twitter. Talk about engaging with your customers through social media!
I actually remember seeing the drive via some Electronica forums a few months ago to get KLM to do this. The thing is, there are tons of Dutch recording companies, producers, promoters and DJs that fly to Miami for WMC / Ultra every year. I remember noting a few times how many Dutch guys were performing at Ultra this year. It’s cool that this happened and KLM responded so well to it. For a guy who flies KLM to Amsterdam for work and knows a few of the Dutch performers, it’s exciting the industry that a small group managed to make this happen.