Because of their cheap fares and high customer service rankings, both airlines have legions of loyal travelers. Part of that loyalty can also be traced to fresh marketing that tries to put some fun in flying. JetBlue’s tongue-in-cheek ads have urged executives to get off their private jets and fly JetBlue. In Southwest TV ads, CEO Gary Kelly told customers “It’s On” in New York.

Both airlines are on YouTube. Blogs and Twitter are also important parts of their brands.

JetBlue’s social media efforts include a robust Flickr photostream. Southwest’s highly regarded blog, Nuts About Southwest, also links to a Flickr photo gallery. On YouTube, JetBlue is here and Southwest is here – and Southwest has the clear lead over JetBlue in terms of channel views and subscribers on YouTube. If JetBlue has a recently updated blog, it isn’t easy to locate – though the former blog of a former CEO shows up high in the Google results.

You can follow Southwest on Twitter @SouthwestAir, while JetBlue is on Twitter @JetBlue – where its more than 1 million followers is more than double the current number of people following Southwest on Twitter.

Neither airline features their YouTube, Flickr, Twitter or Facebook links on their consumer-facing home pages, though Southwest includes a text link to “our blog” – which does feature its social media efforts. The Southwest blog even links to CEO Gary Kelly’s LinkedIn profile. (Looking at the LinkedIn-created pages for each company. JetBlue’s is better than Southwest’s.

Although JetBlue is trouncing Southwest on Twitter, on balance it is clear Southwest has the edge in understanding and using social media. Whether that translates into winning the Battle of Boston remains to be seen. That Twitter lead is potentially a huge edge for JetBlue.

If Mesh Media was advising Southwest, we’d urge them to focus intently on growing their Twitter following – and using Twitter as a promotional channel to reach fliers in Boston and beyond – and market to them. (One thought: Offer a free round-trip ticket each week to one random Twitter follower, to grow the number of followers rapidly. Then market extensively to Twitter announcements of fare sales, new routes, etc.)  If we were advising JetBlue, we’d urge a more integrated and cohesive approach to its social media – and a blog that belongs to the airline and would continue on past a change in leadership at the top.  A million-plus followers on Twitter is a great ready-made channel for promoting the airline – and a blog can be programmed to automatically “Tweet” on Twitter and Facebook.

Mesh Media’s favorite airline is Southwest – we love the low fares, the good service, the boarding procedures and the attitude. We’ve never had the opportunity to fly JetBlue as they don’t currently serve our hometown, or we might like them too.

One thing I’d like to see Southwest offer – a free iPhone app where a person could check fares and schedules, make reservations, check in and track Rapid Rewards points.

Update 8/17/09: Southwest Airlines responded via Twitter:

@meshstrategies Use mobile.southwest.com save on your homepage as a bookmark!

Done. Looks good. Works like a good iPhone app. Thanks. Another reason why Southwest is our favorite airline.

(It’s a crazy notion – all those links and story snippets out there that so irk the AP actually drive traffic to AP stories on AP-member websites, thus increasing the value of the AP content to the publishers of those sites. Rather than try to stamp out the spread of AP stories via social networking, the AP ought to be trying to encourage it – so that they can charge AP members more to use AP content.)

The AP also seems to have forgotten the “fair use” doctrine well established in American copyright law – it won’t be difficult for Google or your average small-traffic blogger to show that their usage of an AP headline and a paragraph or two is protected by the fair use doctrine.

The AP’s announcement of its new policy demonstrates that the AP has become a pointless and unnecessary part of the media. Let’s consider first the three basic things the AP does, why they are no longer needed (and what has or can replace them), and then consider how this impacts business marketing and campaign communications.

First, the AP does the following three basic things for newspapers (and fills similar roles for broadcast media):

1. It moves stories from AP-member newspapers that published them to AP-member newspapers that want to publish them.

2. It takes content generated by newspapers, edits it, and distributes the AP version electronically to AP-member newspapers that want to use them.

3. It publishes original stories written and edited by AP staffers for use by AP-member newspapers.

The AP is a middleman in the first two roles, adding zero value in role #1 and minimal value in role #2. The Internet has put middlemen on the endangered species list.

The AP’s greatest real value, and the hardest to replace, is what the AP does in role #3. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The newspaper industry, if it chose to do so, could replace the AP in role #1 simply by creating a central web hub where newspapers would upload their content and download content from other papers that they want to use. Each paper would agree to pay other papers a flat standard fee for use of the other paper’s content. If the standard fee was $10 and Paper A used three stories from Paper B and Paper B used one story from Paper A, at the end of the month Paper A would send Paper B $20. Layer on a system of category and tag indexing and a simple system of processing compensation and the AP is no longer needed as a middleman.

As for role #2, the AP versions of stories are intended to be shorter and, I daresay, blander version of the original story published by the newspaper. Back when newspapers were limited to publishing with ink on paper, shorter stories from the AP allowed newspapers to carry more stories (and transmitting them over the wires was less expensive). In today’s web world, pixels are not so limited so stories can be whatever length they need to be. AP re-editing stories that were already produced by reporters and editors at AP-member papers is mostly redundant – and contributes to bland, boring journalism. If you’ve never been to journalism school I have a revelation for you: Learning to write stories the way the AP re-edits stories is not an upper level writing class. J-schools teach AP style and the basic AP story format – the dreaded inverted pyramid – as a basic skill set because the basic AP story structure is a good guideline for a rookie reporter to follow in reporting a basic news story.

But the inverted pyramid – the most important info in the lead, less important info in each successive paragraph – is a formula by which each sentence in a story is more boring and less important than the sentence which preceded it. You won’t find examples of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism or book-length journalistic works of non-fiction written following the AP’s style and structure.

So much for AP Role #2.

Now, let’s consider Role #3 – the AP producing original content.

Can the news media live without it? As a former newspaper reporter and magazine editor, I believe it can – and in fact would be improved by doing so. Too many newspapers have become lazy and stopped sending reporters to cover many important stories, trusting the AP would be there. For example: Nashville’s daily newspaper, The Tennessean, often doesn’t cover things that happen at the state capital, just a few blocks away, because the AP will have a reporter there. Many newspapers across Tennessee rely on the AP for coverage of the state legislature, with the result being that newspapers all across Tennessee all have the same bland, boring AP stories filling much of their pages.

But if the AP ceased doing original content tomorrow, what would replace it?

Well, for one, newspapers would have to cover more stories that happen in their town, city or region – and they’d have to rely on each other for stories from outside their region – which means sharing content and coordinating coverage planning with each other directly via that central web hub rather than continuing to pay the AP to perform middleman roles that no longer add much value to the media process.

So much for the media biz commentary – what does the AP’s new anti-social media policy mean for you and your effort to promote your business, organization, cause or campaign? Chances are, the AP won’t be able to enforce its policy. First, fair use doctrine virtually guarantees it will lose in court if it chooses to sue. But if it tries to enforce it, you’ll see a backlash against the AP on the part of bloggers and users of other social media. Fewer links to AP stories on AP-member sites will reduce the value of successfully pitching a story to the AP.

Ironically, the AP attack on social media will, we believe, only serve to increase the value of blogs and other social media as outlets for information. As the AP slides ever-more-rapidly into irrelevance, we will see the continued rise and flowering of a more decentralized and grassroots media in which stories spread virally from person to person via blogs and Facebook and Twitter based not on the reach of the outdated AP system but based on what people find interesting and share with others.

Newspapers print an AP story because it’s what is available and because they paid for it.

The social media spreads a story because it is what people find interesting.

In the not-so-distant past, the only way to follow the Tour de France was through TV, newspapers, or radio. People in the U.S. (lucky enough to have cable) would wake up before dawn to watch the race in real time. Then came the Internet, which made stats and information on the race course and teams more readily available. Technology continued to expand, and last year the big advance was Google’s Street View of the race.

But, now there’s Twitter, which takes it to a whole other level. No longer are riders’ recaps spliced into packaged sound bites, or multi-bike crashes simply breezed by and forgotten. From wind resistance to inside jokes, the kind of information fans can get has broadened as dozens of cyclists tweet their views and thoughts throughout the course of each day.

From a social media perspective, it’s worth nothing that one of the photos illustrating the story was provided by a fan via Flickr, the online photo-sharing site, not a professional photographer.