Reflection on Social Media Case 12: United Breaks Guitars

               Honestly, the more cases that we study like this the more I wonder why companies don’t just put the customer first. Anyone can post their bad experiences with a company on social media, and that’s exactly what Dave Carroll did when United Airlines mishandled his guitar. Except Dave Carroll made a whole song and music video about the incident, which received 18 million views. However, he tried to get United to remedy the situation for a year, and when nothing was done he made the video. So United Airlines definitely had it coming.

               United not handling this simple problem caused them a much bigger problem which caused them bad publicity and a loss of revenue. Just a simple search on Google of the song title “United Breaks Guitars” brings up many different news articles on the whole situation. One of the articles that comes up is from FAST COMPANY and they quote The Times of London, saying that the bad PR cost United 180 million dollars from the plunge in the stock market. Although there’s no proof that that price is entirely accurate, I’m sure it did cost them way more than it would have if they would have just addressed the problem in the beginning.

               Dave Carroll even wrote a book on the whole situation which you can find on AMAZON. His book is titled “United Breaks Guitars: The Power of One Voice in the Age of Social Media.” I think that the title of this book says it all. One voice really does have so much power on social media and it’s not just the voices of people with power and money, but the voices of normal everyday people. This is why it is so important that companies provide their customers with good customer service, because any of their customers could be that one voice that shares their bad experience, causing the company more problems than it had initially.