Interesting side note: according to JetBlue, a lot of what drove the coverage of  the All-You-Can-Jet pass — which was featured on all the major broadcast networks — was social media. The airline released a traditional press release, but also made an announcement to its 1 million-plus followers on Twitter.

“Within minutes [of the Tweet], we could see the response start to trickle in,” JetBlue spokesman Bryan Baldwin told USA Today. “We were just watching the hits come in on Twitter. They were coming in by the dozens. It really got its jumpstart in the social media world.”

The company also says that its Web-site’s traffic increased more than 800 percent after the announcement was made.

My own decision to buy the ticket wasn’t motivated by social media — I don’t use Twitter. I had heard about the promotion on National Public Radio, but it’s interesting to note the role that social media may play in coverage. If something manages to develop some buzz in a social space it (ostensibly) displays evidence of value in that social network — and that proves its value as an item of interest to news organizations.

In my own experience as a journalist, I can attest to a kind of desperate frenzy on the part of news organizations to get a bead on what’s important to an audience. If you can convince a news outlet that you’ve got something that people are interested in, you won’t have to do much arm-twisting to get that news outlet to pick it up. And any coverage that results only extends the reach of that buzz even further. If the story hadn’t made it into the major news circuit, for instance, it’s unlikely that JetBlue would be sitting on my $599.

Whether all that buzz has translated into sales for JetBlue is another story — as you’ll see in my later posts.