KLM wondered how social media could enhance their passenger service. So we created an experiment on how happiness spreads. For 6 weeks we installed a team at Schiphol Amsterdam Airport, who would track down KLM passengers who checked in via Foursquare to surprise them with a personalized gift that made their travel even more enjoyable. So, happy travelling would already start at the airport.

At first we used Foursquare to claim all possible spots within Amsterdam Airport. Than we started monitoring who was checking in on one of these spots. If we found a KLM passenger, we started scanning their social profiles so we would really get to know them and their travel plans and we came up with a personalized gift and ran like madmen through Schiphol Airport to surprise this person. This gave quite a boost at the airport and online. We made a mini documentary of what we did and made a special website with all the KLM surprise stories. What really caught us by surprise is this caused an enormous second wave of attention: it was picked up worldwide. It proved that if you genuinely do something good for your target audience, it gets picked up and social media is not just a medium, but a massive PR instrument.

The KLM surprise experiment spread widely. By surprising 28 passengers with gifts, we generated and tracked well over 1,000.000 direct impressions on Twitter alone (blogs excluded). Our online video was featured and discussed on hundreds of blogs and media as a best practice case on how to do relevant stuff with social media including the BBC and The Next Web. KLM surprise converted over 5,000 new friends for KLM on Facebook. Which is at the core of their contact strategy. But most importantly: every conversation online actually was about the extra stretch KLM would go for their passengers and not about the funny campaign an agency did. It was proof an experiment could work.