Finnair Quality Hunters: Excellent PR Campaign

Today I received an in-mail on LinkedIn inviting me to take part in the Quality Hunters program organized by Finnair. The idea is simple: if you take a job, you´ll get to travel the world and all you need to do is to seek for quality improvement opportunities and actively use social media to keep the world updated on your travels:

Even before the program started, there is already lots of activity on Twitter @qualityhunters. I believe this is a great initiative on increasing media presence in social networks (see Social Networks and Marketing for more great examples on using social media in promotional campaigns) if you consider that:

• Finnair will be putting their Quality Hunters on unsold seats, so, basically, at zero cost;
•  the targeted profile is Generation Y, so social media is virtually their mother milk - they will be very productive even if they do not get the job;
• another characteristic of Gen Y profile is that right now many are struggling to get a job but are very eager to travel the world, so they will jump at this opportunity;
• there are multiple options for tracking performance of Quality Hunters: (1) quantitative - the amount of content generated by them online and (2) qualitative - the nature of the content + actual quality improvement ideas;
• quality improvement ideas come from creativity, so getting young and bright to do it is probably the coolest thing ever. Now compare the costs of this program to costs of hiring a bunch of consultants from BCG or McKinsey (where creativity is synonymous to "you don't work here anymore") - do you get the ROI potential?