United Breaks Guitars

This is the perfect example of how a PR nightmare starts. Dave Carroll was sitting on a United Airline flight and watched a airline baggage handler throw his Taylor guitar around on the tarmac as it was destroyed. Carroll then went to the airline after getting his broken guitar asking for reimbursement and this is where things went terribly wrong for United. Quickly after this mess with United Dave Carroll had uploaded a video singing about his ordeal which quickly had thousands of views on YouTube.

Possibly one of the biggest mistakes the airline made was failing to create good communication internally. There was a large lack of communication between the different departments within United. As a PR professional, one should be aware of everything going on within the company- whether it is good information or bad so that you have the ability to correct it before it gets out of hand. Thus, it is essential to converse with public relations so they have a chance to “spin” the situation and avoid as much negative media exposure as possible. The internal PR group should have spent the time researching this through internal channels before it was leaked out. They should have contacted Dave Carroll and negotiated an agreement of some sort

The interesting part about this is how Carroll gave the company several different warnings that he would be writing a song and posting online yet there was still nothing done. This is when a good PR representative would step in and try to quickly correct the problem to save the company the bad press. A good PR person is very familiar with the different types of free media outlets and how quickly you can have a storm of bad PR.

Carroll’s song was everywhere in the media and he actually became famous because of this song. PR professionals should know better than anyone, the power that the internet can have on individuals. The social media influences everyone. People can interact with other people and connect on several sites such as, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc. People who work in public relations use these tools to promote a company, and thus are well aware of the fact that one single post, message, or song, can be seen by millions of people in just a short period of time. To me, it seems to be like a domino effect. If one person watches a YouTube video and writes “United Breaks Guitars” on their Facebook wall, others will follow. A good example of this is when someone sees a funny video it is quickly posted and shared among the social media sites.

United Airline should have jumped on this opportunity from the start and stopped this before it was a problem. If United would have just taken the time to call Dave Carroll and get this take care of it could have saved the company large of amounts of money and bad publicity. This is an industry that currently is struggling in the first place so it should have been top priority to try and save their image. This will make many companies realize the importance of keeping good standing and providing great customer service to all.