My colleague Gigi tipped me on the latest campaign of Airbnb, which comes less than a week after their guest from hell publicity. It seems no coincidence that they turn to their customerbase to help them wash that smudge away, from an otherwise spotless image.

Invite your friends and earn $100 travel credit

The tell-a-friend campaign is as old as the road to Rome, but Airbnb would not be Airbnb if it weren't a bit special. For starters, they didn't tuck it away in a footer or post-booking, it's a big leaderboard on their homepage and every subsequent page, until you do it or click it away. 

Invite friends over email, Facebook, Twitter, or post this your special member gets member URL anywhere. You get this neat looking postcard if you use the distribution per email. Every contact you send it to that isn't on Airbnb yet, will be your referral. A refferal booking a trip worth over $75 will be rewarded with a $25 coupon for your next trip. If your referrel is having a house trashed, erm rented out, then you get a $75 coupon! If you're the first in your network using it, you might end up with quite some storecredit! (potentially $100 per contact if they both rent out and book) Don't try to be a smart ass and let them all book your apartment, they thought of that one in the T&C's...

Why would  it not feel like spam?

If you share the link four times a day on Twitter, send wallposts to every FB friend and an email to all your contacts it probably will. However the receiver gets a treat too: $25 off on the first trip over $75. Also, I noticed the system recognizes if an email contact is already a member and won't send our the message. Also on FB wallposts it checks the DB first, however the error message lacks and shows 'just invited 0 friend'. 

So far I have only received 1 email about it (from Gigi) and did not see any tweets about Airbnb accept the ones about the trashed place. Probably this is because of the nouveauté of the campaign, certainly not the execution of it. It has a smart dashboard to track who you invited and if they's booked, good FB integration annd cool email templates. It looks like a win-win-win situation for the sender, receiver and in the end of course Airbnb. 

What is your opinion on this member gets member program: a counter offensive against the TechCrunch negativity of late? Too spammy or the way to go? How would you do it differently? 

Update: Brian Chesky left a very sincere post on their learnings and action points. Well done. 
Update 2: Through a comment in Tnooz I was told this reward system was there before the PR debacle.
Update 3: Airbnb rolls out 40 new Safety Features. Amazing.