It is called Get Amongst It and it is “Grabaseat’s network for Kiwi Experience Junkies” and Air New Zealand’s foray in the world of social networking. I think this is extremely interesting and something that we are going to see more and more of in the travel industry. I reported earlier on my thoughts about the increasing trend of travel companies to build strategies around social networks.

I don’t think that the Get Amongst It social network offers up any different angle that is going to make it any better than anything else – however, as I said to Mat Weir in passing yesterday, the general public are dumb so they will get behind this and it will be successful. From Air New Zealand’s point of view success is a difficult measurement – will they judge the success of the site by how many users, or will they judge it by sales through Grabaseat? There is currently no relationship between a user on the site and Air New Zealand; when you register you are not asked for you frequent flyer number nor is there anyway to book a flight. Perhaps these are coming. Perhaps the intention is to release special flight prices to those within the social network before the rest of the country – that might make sense. I do wonder if those that buy flights on Grabaseat really have any brand allegiance even if they are part of a social network around the brand. With Jetstar now in New Zealand is this market not entirely price driven regardless of brand attachment.

At present however, the website is built on the Ning open source platform with the pretty stock standard stuff of photo and video sharing – which raises my question of why would you, when that is what you do with your friends on Facebook?

Nonetheless, there is one absolutely invaluable tool that the rest of us can glean out of the Get Amongst It social network. Whilst I was exploring it and setting up myself as a user to test I discovered that there are no “no-follow” tags on the links within the text areas you can build up for yourself. Although the page rank is only 2/10 it is conceivable that this could well rise pretty quickly as everyone gets involved. With clever use of anchor text in your links you might find that you can generate some pretty good high ranking links to your website for search engines – thanks Air New Zealand.

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