David Armistead has Jon Lebkowsky and Dave Evans have written a good summary of the “United Breaks Guitars” saga on the excellent Social Web Strategy blog.
The short version of the story is that Dave Carroll (a singer-songwriter from Halifax) guitar was broken by United baggage handlers and United Airlines gave him the runaround on compensation for almost a year before simply saying “No” to his claim. So Carroll wrote a song and produced a video – that received 3.5 million views in a few weeks.
Key quote from the post about this story:
We are already deeply into a real sea change, a transformation of the way we organize and coordinate and relate. It affects all our social capital, all our stakeholder relationships. This sea change is technologically based and cost driven, and it is being profoundly accelerated by the emergence of the new social media technologies which are deeply socially enabling. Adoption of these transforming technologies is not optional.
The only thing I would add to this is that for every social media intervention that breaks hugely like United Breaks Guitars has, there are likely dozens of smaller-scale conversations occurring about dozens of other subjects related to any large company. It would be easy to think that they’re not important – but anyone of them could become a big deal at any time.
Companies that don’t take social media seriously are putting all of the work they do at risk. There is a whole range of tools available to companies now – everything from free alerts, to basic monitoring tools, to Exvisu’s advanced reputational analysis studies that can help companies understand how they are perceived and where problems have arisen or may soon arise. For a company to not avail itself of such tools is needlessly risky behaviour.