A novel social-media based competition by British Airways really took off in September. The United Kingdom’s flag-carrying airline tempted entrants with the opportunity to win one of five pairs of tickets to Toronto or LA. The competition was publicised using Twitter’s Promoted Trends and the entry requirement simply involved tweeting with the hashtag #RaceThePlane. But rather than just another bland Twitter hashtag competition that lacked the wings to get off the ground User’s tweets powered BA’s Tweetliner, a virtual plane. It raced against a real aircraft – the Boeing 787 Dreamliner – during flights between London and Toronto on September 19th, and between London and LAX on September 24th . The more tweets mentioning the hashtag, the faster the virtual plane flew and progress of these races could be tracked on a specially created website
