Neworld, Great relationships build great brands

Last year Dutch airline KLM conducted a very interesting social media driven rewards program. Instead of just allocating points or gifts to frequent flyers they identified passengers who had checked in on Foursquare, or were tweeting about waiting for a KLM flight. A team of people checked the social profiles of the these passengers for clues about their personality, and choose gifts that somehow reflected the online content available on their social networking profiles.

The point of the campaign was to surprise passengers who may have a boring wait ahead of them. The idea that a company would then surprise you with a gift based on some aspect of your personality, or your likes is an interesting concept. It would certainly make socially connected passengers incredibly happy, and also very likely to tell their social network all about it.

While the KLM social surprise campaign took place last year, the airline released a video just before Christmas capturing some of the KLM Surprise moments.