United Airlines and online reputation - responding to Sons of Maxwell ‘United breaks guitars’

Posted by: Paul Matthews

Check out this YouTube effort by Canadian band Sons of Maxwell who have been fighting United Airlines since March 2008 over compensation for damaged guitars while touring. Clearly, the band felt they weren’t getting a satisfactory response from the airline, so after a frustrating 12 months or so, they finally took matters into their own hands. The  video was loaded onto the Sons of Maxwell YouTube channel on Monday, and after only three days it’s already had 640,000 views!! It’s certainly not doing any harm to the band’s reputation at the moment, with loads of coverage both online and offline.

Not sure about United Airlines though…try a Google search. My effort today saw links to the video crop up in the all important first page of natural search, three times in fact: ranking 3rd, 5th and 10th! So one video, that didn’t exist three days ago, has single handedly impacted on the Airline’s online reputation on a massive scale, and it’s probably long lasting - those popular video links will be around for some time to come.

So how is United Airlines responding so far?  Let’s check Twitter, where the Airline has a feed with an impressive 15,871 followers to date. At the time of writing this blog post, some 72 hours or so since the video went live, the Airline has tweeted on ten occasions, a modest frequency which is slightly surprising.

While there are four responses to individual queries from Twitter followers concerning the Sons of Maxwell video,  which to the Airline’s credit  acknowledge their stuff up (one tweet by the Airline even suggests they’ll use the video for future customer service training!), the company has failed to issue a general tweet to their whole community explaining what happened, offering their side of the story and how they intend to it put it right. Maybe that’s to come, but three days seems a tad long for a well resourced corporate such as United Airlines.

Compare that to Ford USA and their impressive handling of a communications crisis which spread rapidly on Twitter one day in December last year. Ford’s Scott Monty dealt with it in a matter of hours in a professional, honest and balanced way which enhanced the company’s reputation and integrity within its all important online community.

Maybe there’s a lesson here for United Airlines. Rather than one faceless corporate Twitter feed,  the Airline could have real, identifiable, and accountable people who represent and champion the company online. As things stand at the moment, the Sons of Maxwell episode is looking like a lost opportunity for the Airline, but the door hasn’t closed completely - there’s still time to redeem themselves.

I don’t recommend you check out United Airlines on Facebook though, where I’m afraid the Airline fails miserably. There are a number of sites (some not exactly favourable!), but the largest community appears to be the official fan page with 9,200 fans. And so far it says: “United Airlines has no recent posts”!

While Sons of Maxwell are talented musicians who can write their own lyrics and call on production professionals to create a slick, if slightly too long, clip for YouTube, the social media tools of today really do place the means behind these types of initiatives within easy reach of most online consumers. So you can look forward to more of these to come…