Customer Satisfaction Blues on Youtube
David Carroll, a Canadian singer was flying from Halifax to Nebraska with a stop over in Chicago where he and other passengers watched in horror as United Airlines damaged his guitar. United was unresponsive after many attempts so he wrote a song, put it on Youtube. After 150,000 views, it was picked up by CNN and his song has been viewed by over 6 Million viewers on Youtube. United responded!
There are 4 videos in this post. The 2 songs Dave Carroll had released on video, the CNN episode it generated and Dave’s comment on the attempts by United Airlines to make amends. There is a third song to come.
This is what is possible with social media! While not everyone can write songs and deliver them as well as Dave Carroll, what is a possibility today, will become more and more main stream. Both Positive and Negative. While this post deals with the negative impact of videos, there is another Youtube video that gives a compliment to Lowes. See it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VXPqX7Z45Y. (note this is not the best video in the world as part of it oriented sideways but the idea of using Youtube as a vehicle to communicate customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction is demonstrated in this video as well)
Here’s Dave Carroll’s Story. I like the song.
United Breaks Guitars – CNN Situation Room – Wolf Blitzer
Dave Carroll Statement about United’s Response
Have you seen other examples of this kind of behavior or other interesting uses of Social Media or Web 2.0 techniques to get customer satisfaction issues exposed?
Update: Feb 28, 2010
United Breaks Guitars Song 2
In an article titled Capital Communicator: Beware the Legal Issues of Social Media, the impact of United Breaks Guitars video was a loss of $120 Million in Market Capitalization.
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May 17th, 2010 at 11:42 pm
[...] 6. Youtube, the second largest search engine in the world. Negative customer comments recorded on Youtube go viral fast (see United Breaks Guitars). [...]
July 14th, 2010 at 11:52 am
[...] to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! United Airlines is in the news again. After the fiasco with United Breaks Guitars, a video that went viral on Youtube about a damaged guitar, United lost a passenger’s [...]