United Airlines broke a guitar. What ensued online was comprehensively a brand trashing and demonstrated what happens if you don’t pay attention to social media – even just monitoring it – it can cost your company $180,000,000. This is a follow on from my posts on Cost of Inaction, also Steak and Shake and Apple vs Engadget.
Dave Carroll’s guitar got broken on a United plane flight. If you watched the video, you’ll know he got the run around before being told NO. So he wrote this song, recorded it, made a video and popped it up on YouTube.
- 3 million views within 10 days, 5 800,000 views now – and 36,500 ratings (5 out of 5), 22,700 comments. (Mashable)
- In Google search, just under 20 million returns for “United Breaks Guitars” (Google)
- Number one downloaded song on iTunes (Toronto Star) after only a week
- When I scanned through, BoingBoing, Mashable, The Huffington Post, and traditional media like the Telegraph (UK), Rolling Stone, LA Times, and Australia’s Crikey, Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane Times, etc had picked up in the story.
- $180 million dollars lost in share price. (see later)
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