United Breaks Guitars

“The power of YouTube turns an obscure musician into a video star and corporate headache in less than a week,” stated socialmediantoday.com.

United Airlines picked the wrong customer to make unhappy. Dave Carroll a country singer and songwriter from Canada witnessed his $3500 Taylor guitar being tossed around and damaged by United Airlines, “crew men” during his flight to Chicago, IL. According to Carroll’s statement he then went through a year long process of people to try and receive compensation for his damaged guitar but in the end was given a firm “no” by a United Airlines official named Ms. Irlwig.

Since then Carroll has written and posted three videos on YouTube utilizing his talent for song writing to tell his story about United Airlines Customer Service. The first video released on July 6, 2009 according to recent numbers has been viewed over seven million times. The second video released on August 17, 2009 has been viewed by over eight hundred thousand viewers.

An official statement from Carroll was released a short time after the first video stating that he gave United Airlines a “fair warning” saying that, “he was an up and coming country music star and was about to write a series of songs about his negative experience with this company.”

Carroll also stated that he had been contacted by United Airlines Officials and was offered compensation for the guitar. Carroll graciously gave them a counter offer of donating the money to a charity of their choice. United Airlines then donated $3,000 to a charity that teaches underprivileged children to play music.

United Airlines made little to no effort to control the situation in social media outlets, which is a mistake. The only remnants of the companies response was on Twitter with a tweet from a United Airlines spokeswoman stating, “It is excellent and that is why we would like to use it for training purposes so everyone receives better service from us.” At least they are taking something good out of this video and making it into a positive spin for the internal perspective of the company.

Carroll was just an ordinary customer that was unhappy with the service that was given to him so therefore instead of sharing this story by word-of-mouth to his friends and family he decided to share it with the world. This is a great example of what Social Media has done to our society where anyone can have a voice, especially if it is in the form of a “catchy tune.”

Dave Carroll ‘s solo disc and this band, Son’s of Maxwell’s” eight albums have shown and increase in sales since his “United Airlines Breaks Guitars” video release. United Airlines has been rumored to have lost over three hundred million in which is ample enough evidence to state that Dave Carroll succeeded in his job to hurt United Airlines Reputation.

In my perspective, Dave Carroll and the very lucky charity organization score one point… United Airlines and their Public Relations staff are still at zero.