Engage customers who travel to or live in these cities to help write the guides using a carefully moderated wiki. JetBlue recently launched Blue City Guides for five cities: San Francisco, New York, Orlando, Pittsburgh, and Houston. The guides include essential information, promotions and fare sales, and blogs and photos from the crewmembers who regularly fly to these cities. They’re a good start, and certainly better than anything I’ve seen from any other airline.

But they won’t become as successful as they could be.

Why?

They’re a one-way trickle of information that people might look at once, but can’t contribute to, and as a result they won’t repeatedly visit. Jeff Jarvis feels the same way, arguing that airlines are sitting on a major opportunity:

“Airlines should capture the knowledge of their wise-about-traveling crowds. Imagine if, on return trips, the airlines asked us the hotels where we just stayed and ate and invited us to rate and review them. Imagine if they asked natives to share some inside tips on eating and shopping in their towns. They have a currency to pay for the information: They could reward us with frequent-flier bonus miles. Because they know who we are, they could even start to anonymously aggregate other data around this: ‘American Express Platinum customers recommend….”

Here’s are three reasons why a wiki that encourages customers to help build the city guides would be a winner for JetBlue:

1. keep customers on their site = audience pays attention
2. contributing content about the places they’ve visited = active, engaged audience
3. most importantly discovering new places to visit and buying travel from JetBlue = Paydirt!

Right now, the only way to send JetBlue feedback on the city guides is via this page, which suggests either sending an email, or calling them and recording feedback that they may use in a promotional video. I love you JetBlue, but I’m not going to invest the time to write feedback in an email when I have no idea whether it will ever actually be used, nor am I going to call you and record my voice over the telephone. Now give me a:

1. wiki, where I can contribute something of value and see the fruits of my labor almost immediately (and have several crewmembers moderate the articles on their cities - it’s not much more effort than the blogging they’re already doing)
2. let me record audio or video using YouTube, Seesmic, or one of the countless other mobile/video/audio/mashup tools and tag it with “JetBlue” and the name of the city I’m talking about so you and others can find it
3. maybe give me a few TrueBlue points (say, 1 point for every 5 substantial contributions I make)

and I’m yours. And I’ll tell all my friends about how JetBlue found a way to be even cooler than it already is.

So are you interested? Leave me a comment or get in touch.

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• “…and then the CEO admitted I was right, and I got 25 comments.” - sent from iPhone