Before reading this, you should watch this video. It explains everything extremely well… and it’s catchy:
Now, don’t get me wrong, I would be mad as hell if some United Airlines employees were throwing one of my guitars around and broke (and none of my guitars are as nice as the beautiful Taylor that they broke).
United is catching a lot of flak for this incident, and I think someone needs to take a stand for the airline!
Sure they are a piss poor airline, with unhelpful employees, bad food, an aging fleet, they broke Canadian folk musician, Dave Carroll’s guitar, refused to pay to fix it, and then completely blew the management of their social media crisis… But, in United’s defense, I’m sure they never would have reacted this way had they realized that Carroll was going to write a catchy four minute song about the incident, and post it on YouTube where it would be viewed by upwards of 3.1 million people.
Yeah, I know you are thinking, “it’s not the crisis, it’s the reaction to it; where is the sincere response on YouTube; why aren’t they embracing the catastrophe to mitigate the damage; et cetera.” Look, if you are thinking any of those thoughts you need to realize that United is a dinosaur of a company, and you are asking it to act all young and spry like those whippersnappers at JetBlue or Virgin Atlantic. It’s just not their style.
You wouldn’t beat up your grandpa? So why are you going to beat up on old United?
Small correction
I forgot to mention that Adriana Lukas sent this my way. Thanks Adriana!
The Geek Whisperer 
This also has been getting a lot of attention in the PR/Crisis Communications arena. Interesting the way United has handled this….