Viral Video Social Media Containment

The case in which United broke a customer's guitar, and the customer used social media to spread the negative story about United, shows how big a negative viral campaign can be if it happens to the right (or wrong) person. You can see this just by opening up Twitter and looking at the "trending topics".  When something big happens and starts to trend, even more people click on it to find out why it is trending and it just grows and grows.  The same effect happens through other social media like Facebook and YouTube, although it isn't always defined by the site as trending.  As the article stated, 10 years before the event it would have been near impossible to get the word out on a story like this, but since the Internet connects the whole world, it was easily spread far and wide.

The key to this case was similar to network effect.  If I posted something about hating United, 132 people would watch the video and tell me it is terrible and it would die right there. (Like this video).  However since the man in this case was in a band, he already had a pretty large internet following from fans.  That large initial following was enough to boost the story  outside the normal network and into the realm of viral video.

As for United, when something like this happens, there is almost nothing they can do to stop the negative blast, except wait for it to pass.  They attempted to use Twitter and even send direct messages to counteract the situation but that didn't work.  Especially on Twitter, people like to comment something, then forget about it.  When United responds the original commenter doesn't care, they already said what they wanted to say.  And since anyone can use Twitter, many of the comments are unfounded, or have no evidence.  You could easily start a rumor on Twitter.

If they did not include United's side in this article, I would have suggested United do the things that they actually did.  Although they didn't really help too much, they didn't hurt.  So in the future, I think it may be important for a company to preemptively attack on the social media outlets.  Companies should not just have a social media presence, they should be very active in connecting with people.  They should encourage people to post their feelings about good experiences, as they already know people will be posting the bad.

I liked how United was going to use the video as training, not just from a PR standpoint but from an internal improvement standpoint.  They key also is after the negative story dies down online, they need to attack with positive things including the resolution of the problem.

If I was United I would get a bigger name artist to make a song called United Broke Guitars, to admit to the mistake, and to outline some of the changes that happened at United to where stuff like that won't happen again.  If they can positively attack social media, they could get a viral effect just like their disgruntled customers.