You may have heard about this, but in case you have not it’s a great lesson in how quickly social media can spread when something goes wrong. This e-mail text from my father-in-law says it best:A musician, Dave Carroll, recently had difficulty with United Airlines. United apparently damaged his treasured Taylor guitar ($3500) during a flight. Dave spent over 9 months trying to get United to pay for damages caused by baggage handlers to his custom Taylor guitar. During his final exchange with the United Customer Relations Manager, he stated that he was left with no choice other than to create a music video for YouTube exposing their lack of cooperation. The Manager responded: "Good luck with that one, pal."
So he posted a retaliatory video on YouTube. The video has since received over 6.2 million hits. United Airlines contacted the musician and attempted settlement in exchange for pulling the video. Naturally his response was: "Good luck with that one, pal".
Taylor Guitars sent the musician two new custom guitars in appreciation for the product recognition from the video that has lead to a sharp increase in orders.
Here’s the first video:
It went so well he then did a second video:
Make sure you watch it to the end. United Airlines has got to be saying OUCH!! The second one has had JUST shy of 600,000 hits.
You are now able to purchase these slams on United Airlines from his site:
http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/
Talking about turning lemons into lemonade.
Posts
5 comments:
The funny thing is United’s reaction... They could have used the opportunity to offer free transport of any guitars for the next couple years or something…
But no, they just went down the bureaucratic path…
Carlo - I could not agree more. A lost opportunity.
Another really funny thing is that United lost Dave Carroll's luggage while he was en route to Denver to do a keynote speech for a group of hundreds of customer-service executives: United loses luggage of 'United Breaks Guitars' guy. He doesn't intend to mention this incident in part three of the "United Breaks Guitars" series, which should be out on the Web sometime this month.
United may not have been able to capitalize on this incident, but Taylor Guitars sure has.
Rosie - quite interesting how they made yet more lemons our of that lemonade.
Post a Comment