Comments on: United Airlines Online Public Response to Dave Carroll YouTube Video: 9 Tweets

By: United Airlines Incident all over the Social Media space « Designing and Leading Instantly Responsive Organizations

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:11:53 +0000

[...] is a lot of buzz around this incident. A good analysis of United’s response can be found at Dan Greenfield. Some interesting suggestions for United were penned by Angela [...]

By: Dear United Airlines: Build Community Around this Dave Carroll Catastrophe « Online Community Strategist

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:24:29 +0000

[...] in droves right now, you can take this big bowl of lemons and start making lemonade. There was a post by Dan Greenfield earlier this week that chronicled your responses on YouTube and Twitter and compared them to the [...]

By: Patrick Boegel

Patrick Boegel — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:00:25 +0000

Interesting stuff. I am not sure the problem really lies within how they handled his in social media but their utter failure in immediately making amends to ruining a paying customers property.

I am bid advocate of social media, but once the conversation escalates to this level you get to a point where the fire needs to burn down to the embers vs. trying to pour a cup of water on a blaze.

The role of social media at this juncture should be for instances like this, recognizing the problem and not allowing it to become an inferno.

Say for example this happened two weeks ago, and Dave has a smartphone and was tweeting about this as it happened, ideally that is where someone at United could begin to address it head on rather than letting it fester.

Organizations have a lot of retraining of employees to do, whether on purpose (Domino’s) or purely an act of an innocent mistake, companies now face the broadcasting of their paid employees indifference at worst or ignorance live in real time.

By: Joe Koufman

Joe Koufman — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:19:27 +0000

Great case study, Dan!

By: Dan Greenfield

Dan Greenfield — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:17:14 +0000

Point well taken. As PR pros know, there is often a disconnect between PR and customer service. Sometimes PR over delivers and sometimes customer service fails to respond. Either way, they are both on the front line in the age of youtube.

By: Paul Pacer

Paul Pacer — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:45:06 +0000

It seems that the error on the part of United was to do everything but address the issue maybe hoping it would just go away. It took the company a very long time to address the problem faced by customer. The criticism for that seems well-deserved even though once the problem became public, the pr pros jumped in. What will be interesting is how United operates going forward. Back to the old ways, or lesson learned and changes in operations made.