To my surprise, I've found quite a few people who have missed what I think will become one of the classic case-studies in customer management and PR in the web age. It stretches back over a year and involves a talented Canadian folk musician, Dave Carroll, and the story of his trip with his band to perform in Nebraska.

The band was forced to check in their guitars as luggage, and used strong hard-sided cases for the purpose. While in transit at Chicago flying on United Airlines, passengers saw United baggage handlers tossing the guitars across the tarmac with abandon. The United crew on the plane did nothing to help him and it was in Nebraska that he was finally able to check his $3,500 guitar, only to find the neck broken. Dave tried for over a year to get some explanation and compensation from United, but got a final "no" at the start of 2009. His parting message to the United representative was that he intended to write three folk songs about the experience.

Good to his word, Dave and the band created a folk masterpiece - a wryly humourous song with a catchy, pacy guitar tune and a great hook - and recorded it to their usual production quality. They also engaged a video producer and produced a funny and watchable music video. The whole package appeared on YouTube last week and is reaching record viewing figures already. It's so good I went looking for a way to buy and download it - but so far Dave isn't selling.

Before long, this phenomenal take-up caught news attention and the video appeared on the US news channels, including CNN and Fox. In each case the reporters sided with the underdog and applauded the song. The manufacturer of Dave's guitar also jumped in, posting a nice video discussing how to get your guitar mended and suggesting United didn't know the rules when they forced the guitars in the hold.

After all this attention, United finally decided they might have a problem. They called Dave and offered him compensation. He responded by saying he wasn't interested in that any more - United had the chance to say that all last year and didn't. He told them that if they wanted to pay money, to give it to charity. United picked a music charity and optimistically posted on Twitter that the matter was now sorted - nothing to see folks, move along.

If only. Dave has posted a short video on YouTube where he says that song two is even better than song one and should be ready in August. I've not seen anywhere that United has responded on YouTube yet, and I suspect their unhappiness will only get deeper until they embrace the situation rather than trying to "solve" it. This one could run and run, and when it's done I think every corporate marketing team wll use it as a case study.

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Posted By webmink to WebMink on 7/16/2009 02:26:00 PM