• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 11, 2010

Social media has become an interesting way for consumers to connect with Virgin America, especially via Twitter. So when the airline decided to add a flight to Toronto, Canada -- its first international destination -- it turned toward Twitter followers asking for names.

The promotion, Name our Canadian Bird, asked Twitter followers to submit their Canadian-themed plane names for the Airbus A320 set to take flight to Toronto later this month. Virgin America plans to post the 10 top picks for voting, and then christen the No. 1 choice on the new aircraft. The promotion kicked off earlier this week, but Virgin America service from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Toronto begins June 23.

Twitter followers got creative. There have been 400 Canadian bird plane name submissions so far. Although not yet ranked, Abby Lunardini, Virgin America's director of corporate communications, says a few company favorites are Plane Gretzky, OOT & ABOOT, Eh-bus in the Hoose, The Eh 320, Like a Virgin, International for the very first time, V-Dot in the T-Dot, Torontino, Flying Zamboni, Northern Exposure, and Canuck Connect.

It doesn't appear that Twitter's failure to support the volume of traffic on the site during the past week has had a negative impact on its Promoted Tweets program. Lunardini says it has not angered or frustrated consumers at all. In fact, Twitter has become a common way for consumers to communicate with Virgin America.

Lunardini recalls that a consumer using WiFi during a flight had trouble getting an attendant's attention, so he sent a tweet to the brand asking for help to track down an attendant to order a meal. Marketers back at corporate managed to get that message and seat number to the flight crew on the plane.

Although Twitter had difficulties with the site recently, experiencing periodic outages, that kind of quick response from Virgin America has become quite common.

Susan Etlinger, consultant at analyst firm Altimeter Group, describes Twitter's "Fail Whale" as an artifact from the days when the site was the "latest bright, shiny object -- a whimsical, human way to say, 'sorry, we messed up," she says. But increasingly, marketers have begun to think of Twitter as an integral part of their mix.

Fail Whale sightings definitely lose their charm for organizations that rely on Twitter as an essential medium to connect with consumers, but Etlinger doesn't think marketers will give up on the platform just yet. "Many know -- or should know -- they don't have access to the full Twitter feed anyway, so even on a good day, they are only seeing a sample of the total Twitter traffic," she says. "That's why they need to have a social media monitoring tool that aggregates multiple media streams -- news, blogs, communities, images, YouTube -- so they have a comprehensive view of what's happening online as it relates to their brand."