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United Boost Guitars
Remember that old marketing quote ‘One unhappy Customer will tell 10 people’. Well I think that saying should be updated. How about, ‘one unhappy customer can tell 2,950,217 people’ (at last count). When United Airlines broke Dave Carol’s guitar and refused to compensate him, they never thought it would turn into an online PR disaster. Dave went on to make a song titled ‘United breaks guitars‘ which generated over 2.5 million views and 15 thousand comments in five days on YouTube alone.
It didn’t stop there, a search for’ united breaks guitars’ on Google News returns 795 results including the timesonline. To top it off, due to Google’s blended results, a query for ‘united airlines’ currently returns two videos about the incident on the first page.
If this was a hurricane it would have to be a category five, if it was an earthquake, it would be magnitude seven, a runaway train that has yet to be slowed. But this post is not about United, or is it about their lackluster response to the viral onslaught.
It’s about the one company that is quietly benefiting from publicity. In case you missed it, it’s Taylor Quality Guitars. By quickly responding to the ‘united breaks guitar’ video, Bob Taylor of Taylor Guitars was able to re-assert the quality of the brand and quickly separate it from the United Airlines incident. They also included useful advice for flying with guitars and also stated that they even repair other makes as well. The two minute response has already generated over 100,000 views on YouTube, including I’m sure viewers who perhaps never heard of Taylor Guitars before.
The moral of the story. Not only is it important to monitor your brand online, but you should also be aware of opportunities where quick wins can be achieved.
Picture, thanks to Tim Parkinson
This is a classic example ORM professionals are well acquainted with. But the message bears repeating.
As Wilson rightly claims in this post, the viral nature of the social media can quickly turn the tables in favour of disgruntled employees, spurned lovers and any others with enough time and creativity to produce multimedia and other material with potentially viral content.
If I remember the case correctly, UA did eventually offer some sort of compensation to Mr Carol, which he refused. By then, the ‘PR onslaught’ Wilson refers to had already caused untold damage.
Traditional ‘offline’ PR agencies would do well to smarten up and upgrade their thinking in the light of this and other similar episodes.
- 17 September @ 12:01 amGreat post Wilson. I’m amazed that companies still don’t understand what we consumers are capable of if we decide to vent our frustrations on the web. I think I will bookmark this article should I ever have a problem with customer service and I feel they are not taking care of me. “See what happened to United?…”
Eric
- 29 September @ 10:23 am