Larry Chiang studies leadership. Recently, Harbus.org interviewed him and cut and pasted the title of his book as the article title, “What They Don’t Teach You At Stanford Business School“. It was controversial because it helped Harvard poke fun of Stanford. If you liked “A Dozen B-School Students You Don’t Wanna Meet“, “How to Work a Twitter Party” and “How Star Fleet Academy is Like An MBA”, you will love this expose on how a tier one brand rising leverages social media.

By Larry Chiang

San Francisco, California — May 6th —

After Mark Cuban got fined by the NBA for tweeting an opinion of a referee, he quipped, “Well, at least Twitter found one way to make money”. Well, there may be another brand rising to the challenge of monetizing Twitter: Virgin America.

I came across Porter Gale when they were doing a Twitter contest to promote their new Orange County (SNA) to SFO route. iJustine covered the party.

Q: What kind of buy-in did you have from upper management (and Branson) to invest in social media?

Porter Gale: Virgin America is a lean and flat organization, as a result the “buy in process”  to support social networking was an internal dialog about communication benefits. Gaining approval to use social networking was not a laborious “sell-in” process. We take pride in being tech-savvy and using social networking is a natural for us.

As for Richard Branson, he supports our efforts but is not involved in the day-to-day decision making at our company. Regardless, I believe that Richard does tweet and he has a Facebook page.

Q: How many man hours do you allocate to twitter and social management?

Porter Gale: Personally, I allocate less than thirty minutes a day to social networking. However, Virgin America does have one individual dedicated to monitoring all social media feeds.

Q: Do you have certain Twitter users that are fans of virgin that YOU love?

Porter Gale: There are a bevy of Twitter users that are fans of Virgin America. However, rather than calling them out – I’d just like them to know that we appreciate their support.

Q: Do you have a frenemy story. Frenemy where they were first your enemy and now your friend?

Porter Gale: As for a Frenemy story, most of our fans have been friends first rather than enemies. We did send a gate agent to greet a plane after a negative tweet about a sandwich. We hope that person is now a fan and that they’ve changed their tune about our chicken club.

Virgin’s Top 7 social media tips:

1.      You can’t please all of the people all of the time.

Brands and individuals, in the social media space, should realize there may be some negative chatter or feedback. Brands must be willing to accept the good and the bad. The real opportunity is the potential to turn negative comments into feedback for learning and company improvement.

2.      Social media provides real time engagement.

To play in social media, you should allocate some resources to monitor comments on a real time basis. Gone are the days of 7 to 21-day response times. At Virgin America, we’re using social media to close ticket sales in real time, to answer service experience questions and more.

3.      Public relations, branding efforts, guest services and even internal communications can be enhanced with social media.

Often companies ask, who benefits from social media? At Virgin America, social media can be used to enhance and amplify many efforts. Hosting a live twitter conversation at 35,000 feet, posting feedback about an event and connecting with teammates that live across the country are just several of the ways social media is being used within our organization.

4.      Social media  content can be “spam like” if not managed.

Just because it’s an easy way to communicate doesn’t mean you should overuse it. Make sure you have a social media content strategy and consider what type of communications you what to use to fill the content pipeline.

5.      Social media is a great way to engage brand fans and key influencers.

Don’t underestimate the power or impact of an individual. For example, someone with hundreds of thousands of twitter followers, or millions of YouTube views could be following your brand.

6.      Social media knowledge isn’t based on length of time in the industry.

Seasoned marketers need to recognize that good ideas come from anywhere – especially in social media. Seasoned marketers need to toss out titles, perceptions about experience levels and must look for information and advice from people active in the space. At Virgin America, we have an intern and several teammates just out of school that have more knowledge in this space than most of the teammates at our company.

7.      Social media is changing rapidly.

All companies and individuals must realize there is no perfect way to use social media. Usage and adoption rates are changing daily and we must adapt and learn with the changing market. It’s possible that our approach to social media today will be dramatically different in the future. For our brand, we’ll tweet, test, learn and adapt as usage evolves becomes more mainstream.

** Virgin’s Top 7 social media tips END **

This post was cranked out in about an hour so email me if you see a spelling or grammatical error(s)… larry@larrychiang com. If you are pitching something be sure to have it center around something YOU didn’t learn in b-school.

Larry Chiang is the founder of Deep Underground Credit Knowledge 9 (Duck9). He has a book coming out called, “What They Don’t Teach You at Business School“. For fun, Larry reads, models and plays basketball. Text or call him during office hours 11:11am or 11:11pm PST +/-11 minutes at 650-283-8008.