2310: United Breaks Guitars

In the Disney film “Newsies” a group of misfit poor kids from 19th century New York are exploited by media mogul Joseph Pulitzer. The group led by Jack Kelly (played by Christian Bale) print their own newspaper and distribute it to the common folk of New York. With the power of the masses behind them they get their voices heard by Pulitzer and ultimately he backs down. It is a classic underdog/ power of the press story mixed in a with an extremely cheesy montage of singing and dancing.
Stories like this made good movies because it could qualify as fantasy. Instances where one person or small group of people could get the attention of a major corporation are few and far between, until now.
I found the story of David Carroll to be worthy of a best selling book. When Carroll was flying through Chicago in 2008 he witnessed United airlines baggage handlers throwing his $3500 Taylor guitar out on the tarmac. After getting to his destination he discovered that $1200 worth of damage had been done to his guitar.
Carroll soon found him self lost in a maze of United customer service claims; a process that lasted nearly a year. During his last call with United where Carroll was told he would receive no compensation he vowed to tell his story to the world through song.
Carroll decided to write 3 songs and publish them on You tube. 'United Breaks Guitars” was the first of the trilogy reaching over 5 million views. The second is approaching 500,000. The third installment will be out soon.
The effects of this campaign exceeded Carroll's expectations. Some reports suggest that the incident could have cost United $180 million due to the rapid decrease in stock prices after the release of the video.
United approached Carroll after the first film and offered him $1200 cash and $1200 in flight vouchers. Carroll rejected the offer and said that it wasn't about the money, it was about the customer service. He suggested United donate that money to a charity. Carroll's album sales and overall fame have skyrocketed in the wake of this campaign.
United never saw this coming. I can't fault them for that. They have customer service policies and protocols that are set up to save the company money. I suspect that the employees Carroll dealt with only did as they were told. However, given the massive impact of this case, United and every other company needs to take a hard look at how to deal with social media and its consequences.
I have lots of respect for David Carroll, the manner in which he s followed through on his promise and his extremely creative idea deserves huge props. However, he may have created a monster. The biggest issue with web 2.0 is that any one can say anything true or false mostly without consequences. It is not unimaginable that web savvy people could black mail a company by doing what Carroll did.
Here is a example scenario: I buy a pair of skis from Rossignol, one of the largest ski companies in the world. Somewhere along the line I break my skis. It was my fault and Rossignol has no liability in the situation. I could call Rossignol and demand a new pair of skis or else I will let the world know that their skis are the least durable hunks of junk I have ever skied on. They reject my demand so I spend a day making a comedic youtube video about how crappy these skis were. Send it to my 400 Facebook friends, twitter it with lots of keywords, post it on Digg and get my friends to digg it. Even if my message doesn't get beyond my own circle of acquaintances, I have probably convinced a few hundred people,who know I am an avid skier, that they should avoid Rossignol skis. In the long run it may have been a better decision for Rossignol to give me a new pair of skis just to keep my mouth shut. I am not advocating this form of social media terrorism. I am pointing out how simple it is for anyone to defame or libel anything. As my father points out to me all the time, once you put it on the internet it can't be taken back no matter what you do. The implications of this case are huge.
As pr professional I'm not sure what I would do if I were working for United. If they attack or even appear to attack Carroll they will do even more damage to their reputation. If they change their claims policy they may end up losing money. If they appear to do nothing they won't win back any of their lost consumers. In my opinion the best option is to publicize this as an isolated incident, take some action to reprimand those workers in Chicago that were responsible and issue a memo to the company to never ever ever let workers be seen throwing baggage again.

Here is the video "United Breaks Guitars"