United Breaks Case

United Breaks Guitars

• Enployees encouraged to monitor social media

• Robin Urbanski requested to speak with Carroll

• Tweeted about resolutions

• Wanted to use video for training

• $1200 in cash and $1200 in vouchers, instead donated $3000 to charity

• ended up direct mailing twitter comments

• Carroll given a tour of baggage facilities

• Handled well enough, however too little too late. Should have donated more

• Twitter first

• Tweeted to previous complainers

• Media members, Perez Hilton etc…

• Digg and social media sites

• Consumerist.com

• LA Times travel section

• Huffington Post, NBCChicago, CNN CBS Morning, Associated Press

• British News began another upsurge in YouTube Views

• iTunes

• Bob Taylor started to support

1. You can't react if you don't know -

Be vigilant for all mentions of your company, people, products and brands. You can begin to do this with a service such as Google Alerts. However, to get more serious, you will need something like Radian6 which can monitor conversations that mention your brand in real-time and even give you a heads-up on the sentiment behind the words.

2. Be quick to acknowledge -

The reason many people post negative comments online is because they don't think they're being listened to (in store, on the phone or by email). So they lash out. Some do this just to warn their friends off using what they believe to be a bad product. Others – the more social media savvy ones – will do it to hurt you and force you to pay attention.

Speed is of the essence. Acknowledge the customer's issue as quickly as possible before it snowballs and picks up other customers and prospects on the way. You do not necessarily need to have an immediate solution – an open, non-judgemental enquiry about exactly what happened will be enough to start the process of constructive engagement. (Of course, you'll also need to follow this up with concrete actions.)

3. See it from their point of view -

For the most part, customers don't know or care about the issues that have caused them problems. It's irrelevant to