This morning I was invited to talk with Bridget and Mike on their show Good Morning Western New York about my All-You-Can-Jet plans for 2010.  It was exciting because I’ve spent the last few days planning and hacking on a new community site for my fellow All You Can Jet travelers.

Sharing Stories:

Last year, I was lucky and was able to tell my story in a BIG way.  Sharing my content and images through a blog and making over 30 media appearances in major publications around the globe.  It was fun, it was exciting, it was selfish.

One of the things that bothered me through out the trip last year was the fact that our “party to-go” marathon around the US received a ton of media coverage and that altruistic projects like Greg Krause’s 30dayonjetblue.com ended up as a foot note in the concluding paragraphs.  It was an interesting problem, how could I solve it?

By Creating a community!

I spoke at the JetBlue Executive Leadership Conference at West Point last year and told them; next year build the scaffold, the community will develop around it organically.

I believe they did a good job using the tools that they were able to use (as a corporation with a legal department and communications guidelines, I’m sure they were somewhat limited by the liability openness exposes the brand to [remember the skittles fiasco]).  I believe that Morgan Johnston and the JetBlue Communications team have done incredible things with their twitter community, facebook pages, blog, and flickr pool.  They really use those channels to their fullest and have created the playbook that other businesses try and replicate.  But, a community of loosely coupled travellers, criss-crossing the western hemisphere, in real time; need more connectivity, more openness, and they need it aggregated in one place.

What AllYouCanJetwork.com NetSetJet.com brings to the table:

So this year, lets build a thriving and interactive community of jet-setters based around a portal.

Enter All You Can Jetwork NetSetJet.com — a community site for everyone to enjoy this culture phenomenon.

Implemented Features:

• Live Twitter feed of #AYCJ
• Community Forum
• Flickr Integration – Grabs photos tagged AYCJ
• AYCJ Community Blog Aggregator (Contact me to have your blog added to our feeds)

Features coming soon

• User Profiles
  • Website URL
  • Foursquare URL (Used to populate our map)
  • Facebook URL
  • Twitter Handle
  • CouchSurfer URL
• Foursquare/Google Maps Mash-up – Showing our users locations around the US! (Find out which other AYCJ’ers are in the same city as you)
• Community Wiki – Share tips on travelling and list cool places to visit in all the AYCJ cities!
• Live Twitter Feed of @jetblue/aycj
• OAuth Integration: Log-in using twitter or facebook to authenticate.

What can you do?

Share stories, images, video, and make new friends.  The spirit of AYCJ is laced with adventure, so take the plunge! Visit http://www.allyoucanjetwork.com and register.  The team and I hope to have the rest of our feature set developed in this next week.  We want to keep refining the experience and adding fun ideas to the project throughout the month of September.

Leave a comment and give us your ideas!