Carroll’s sing song customer complaint has become a staple example, understandably so given the catchy tune, fun video and huge press coverage it got. But over two years on from it catching our attention, what are the real lessons from Dave Carroll’s broken Taylor guitar?

You do not have to be that much of a sceptic to pause for thought, reflecting on how exceptional the Carroll video has turned out to be. It was not so much the first of a flood of similar high profile videos that ended up headlining the television news over the subsequent years but rather one of the rare exceptions. Even Carroll’s two follow-up songs had only a fraction of the viewership or impact.

Nor is that pattern the exception. Other high profile examples of video clips breaking new ground in other fields have also been followed by a trickle rather than a flood – witness how little successful ‘gotcha’ political citizen journalism there has been seen the Macaca moment video grabbed its headlines.

Prepare for the rare disaster

These high profile stories that garner huge traffic online and significant knock-on coverage in traditional media, taking it to audiences that dwarf the original online ones, are the rare exception. That they can happen, potentially to disastrous degrees, is a good reason to think, plan and react – just as any good business has a contingency plan for the rare but potentially catastrophic disaster.

However, it also means that many of the lessons that apply to more regular day in, day out communications work are more subtle than the headline grabbing concern about how a YouTube film could kill your firm overnight.

Social media is the hook for traditional media stories

One is that even if the original social media audience is small, the existence of some sort of happening on it can be a trigger for wider or more sustained media coverage, especially if a high profile figure is involved and uses social media to offer up information to expand and liven up media reports.

I have, for example, twice been recently delayed by Qantas airline problems – one the after-effect of an engine failure meaning the plane I was due to fly on was not in the right continent and one due to a global computer failure meaning they could not get flight information to their planes. Neither attracted much in the way of attention, but the original engine failure that caused my problem did get mass media attention – because Stephen Fry was on that flight and tweeted, both catching the attention of journalists and providing them with extra colour for their stories which were therefore longer and more prominent.

Far more people were affected by the global computer failure than by Stephen Fry’s incident, but it did not get the same attention  as my Twitter audience is hardly in his class.

You can’t tell the public what to use social media for

One thing Qantas did get right was the use of its own social media channels, having learnt the lesson from a year before when another engine failure saw people taking to the internet to find out what was going on – and finding sales and marketing information rather than customer service and reassurance. Qantas was using its digital channel for one purpose; the public wanted something else.

In such a situation, as not only Qantas but Eurostar have found out, the public wins out. The question is simply how long a firm will take the hit to its reputation before accepting reality.

News does not always travel fast, but social media responses do

For someone on the frontline in a press office when a story hits, it can certainly feel that stories move at great speed, continually eluding attempts to get on top of them. However, scratch under the surface and there are often periods of time when the story is in fact spreading slowly. In Dave Carroll’s case, for example, it took a remarkable 17 days for the United Breaks Guitars story to cross the Atlantic. That is still news moving at the speed of a steamship, not the internet.

The pause should have given United Airlines times to get their own reaction out so that the story spread could have been about how well they were handling a problem. That was a lesson Dominos learnt well with a swift response, online and offline, to its 2009 disaster of disgusting employees being stupid enough to film their antics for YouTube. United did not get it right, hindered in particular by United Airline’s failure to get the details of its social media approach right.

Negative stories linger

The penalty for failing to respond is also now all the greater, because rather than today’s news disappearing into tomorrow’s fish and chip paper, negative stories hang around online and accessible for years to come. Go to YouTube, search for “United Airlines” and what frequently comes up at the top of the search results, more than two years on? Dave Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars. And why did a pair of lawyers giving a presentation to a communications group choose to name United Airlines rather than any one of dozens of other examples of customer problems? Because they could readily point to online material.

Dave Carroll may have long since moved on to other songs and projects but audiences keep on coming back to the airline’s failures.

Dave Carroll promised to make a trio of songs, the last of which is now out:

(Also available on the YouTube website here.)

In the world of cut-throat media competition to be first with the news, the internet making it easy for stories to travel round the world quickly, the US being a frequent (if anything, too frequent) source of stories for the British media and a media love of YouTube tales, this news therefore leapfrogged quickly into the British media, right?

Well, no.

In fact there was largely a collective pause for 17 days and it was not until Radio 4 covered the story yesterday morning, that we then had the burst of other mainstream media stories, such as Channel 4, ITN, Sky News* Guardian, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph all playing catch-up. Weirdly, several of the stories which have appeared are by-lined by journalists based in the US. But it wasn’t until the story ran on Radio 4 in the UK that their stories appeared.

Sometimes news still travels slowly.

* That’d be “First with the news, if you don’t count Mark Pack’s blog and others”

The story of Dave Carroll and how his guitar was broken by United Airlines has spawned a hit YouTube song, but it also holds a lesson for how best to carry out customer service in the world of social media.

Dave Carroll, a Canadian musician, flew with United Airlines last year and saw his guitar broken as staff threw luggage around. Failing to get a satisfactory response from United, he finally recorded a song and stuck it on YouTube. The catchy tune, amusing staging and power of the underlying story quickly turned it into a YouTube hit. This in turn triggered widespread traditional media coverage, with the result that not only has the song been watched all the way through to the end three million times, but in addition millions have read, seen or heard media reports about the story.

That will have caused considerable damage to United’s reputation and makes it an excellent case study of how, in the world of social media, one angry customer can combine with a bit of user generated content and the willingness of the media to report online stories to produce large amounts of negative coverage for a firm.

It also illustrates the importance in the social media world of responding in the medium if you wish to make yourself heard. United responded relatively quickly to the song getting wide attention, but because United didn’t use its own online presence effectively to get over its response, many (indeed most) of those finding out about and commenting on the issue online even after United’s response came out were not aware that United had responded at all.

The two tricks which United in particular missed were on YouTube and on Twitter. On YouTube, United Airlines could have recorded a response from a senior figure and then submitted it to appear as a “response” under the Dave Carroll song on the YouTube website. This would have been a very effective way to help ensure that those seeing the negative story also saw United’s response.

United Airlines has an established Twitter presence, with many thousands of followers. However, although it referred to the issue in a tweet the day after the song hit YouTube, this was done as an @ reply to another Twitter user. This means it won’t have been seen by many of their followers on Twitter (as, unless they were also following the person replied to, they won’t have seen the message in their normal stream of messages). Moreover, by not mentioning Dave Carroll’s name or the word guitars in the tweet, United ensured that it wouldn’t be found by people searching for tweets on the topic – again therefore missing out on an audience.

Since then United has upped its use of social media on the issue, including sending a pair of standard tweets, though again they missed out key terms that would be picked up by searches for news on the topic.

The lessons of all this? First, the benefits of having established social media presences so that, if bad news hits, you have the infrastructure ready to help deal with them. Second, the importance of getting the details right so that what you say via social media is seen by as many people as possible.

Do both and you are in a much stronger position to turn the issue round. Do neither and you are making a bad situation even harder to sort.

In return, Dave Carroll has recorded a response:

Apart from the good news that it looks like the second song is going to see the light of day too, it’s interesting to note that although Dave Carroll has a respectable number of followers on Twitter (over 1,000), the millions of views on his clips hasn’t translated into a similarly large number of Twitter followers.

People’s interest in him is, in this respect, not extending much beyond the clips. Whether it will extend to giving a boost to his band’s musical career remains to be seen.

Finally, this case is also a strong example of how an internet phenomenom can translate into traditional media interest, taking the story to a wider audience than even the large online figures. This clip from CNN illustrates the point:

(You can see the film on the YouTube site, with its description giving details of the luggage incident, here.)

It’s already been viewed 600,000 times and two further videos are promised.

There’s a lot of talk in the industry about how you measure the impact of social media compared with, for example, traditional advertising. One of the major problems is that it’s a matter of comparing apples and oranges.

You could look at that 600,000 figure (or whatever it reaches) and compare that with the number of people who see TV or print adverts, but that misses the point.

Over the last few years, I’ve briefly seen all sorts of United Airlines adverts flash before my eyes. Though I struggle to remember them, they have had some sort of impact as they’ve left me with a reasonably positive impression of the airline. Not enough to make me seek them out specifically, but enough to make me feel comfortable if I ended up flying them.

But those years of trying to persuade me have now been undermined by the few minutes on YouTube and those few minutes will – courtesy of the tune and the hats – stick in my mind for longer and more clearly than all those adverts. For me, the strapline for United Airlines is now, “United breaks guitars”.

That’s the damage social media can do.

Meanwhile, I’m half hoping that United don’t react so we get to see the other two films too…