July 17, 2009
Posted by Kelly Rusk
Social media: do you want to be proactive or reactive?
I bet any company who’s fallen into the latter wishes they *had* been proactive…
I’m getting at companies that learn hard lessons from social media: take United Airlines–learning right now. In every one of these cases, (some other notable ones are Dell and Comcast) the company was infamous for bad service, but consumers were helpless. Particularly with United–which is often a cheaper flying option–I suppose United figures that since it has the best prices, it need not worry about offering good service.
Until, of course, one consumer gets so frustrated, he writes a song about it.
A little over a week, and over 3-million views later, and lots of media attention, United has been scrambling to respond to media inquiries to deal with this crisis. More notably however, they have not engaged in social media.
While only dealing with tradional media will help get their message out, the reality is more and more people are accessing news and information online and even through social media (I can be guilty myself sometimes!) United risks not reaching many of those who caught the original story. (In other news, West Jet embraces the opportunity to respond via a Youtube video, though, it gets pulled down, likely because West Jet doesn’t have a perfect guitar track record themselves)
Dave Carroll, the maker of the Youtube video has publicly rejected United’s offer to reimburse for his guitar, and says he plans to make another two videos.
At MediaMiser, we’re tracking the story via our monitoring software, keep an eye on the Turning News into Knowledge blog for our findings…
However, lesson learned here is that any company should be at the very least monitoring and tracking what’s going on online. The last thing you want is to be dumbfounded by a customer angry at you. While these types of stories (read: Motrin moms and Dominos) do fade pretty quickly, they still live forever online and likely leave a bad brand impression on many. It’s also a missed opportunity to show the online world you’re savvy and ready for whatever it can dish out.
