JIT 1 - "United Breaks Guitar"
After seeing the video and reading the article involving Dave Carroll and his smashed guitar by United Airlines -- along with the aftermath -- here are my answers to the questions that you have posted: 1.) United's response to Carroll's video was, in a way, witty. Tweeting the phrase "this has struck a chord with us and we've contacted him directly to make it right" to many people asking over and over again, 'why,' shows two things: a. This was done a year too late. After what Carroll went through, he had every right to make the video and have it go viral. b. To respond to people with that witty phrase, coining terms such as 'struck' and 'chord' just to seem cool really doesn't make it right. Not one bit. So, no, the airline did not handle the situation very well in my honest opinion. They were a year late in dealing with the situation, and to execute the '24-hour' rule when Carroll had to go through option after option was just a low blow. If I give credit to anything that United did, it was donating $3,000 to a music school...but it's very little credit in my book. 2.) Carroll's video was seen by many people so quickly due to the fact that, in this day in age, technological advances made it possible. Thanks to Twitter -- which earlier in the year, moved up to the third-highest-ranked social networking site -- and along with some aid from Consumerist, the video was able to receive 24,000 views in less than 24 hours. Views began to grow within the next few days, allowing Carroll's song to reach out to over 1,500,000 viewers; viewers that probably had the same experience of handling luggage that occurred with Carroll -- possibly dealing with the aftermath of such an event. 3.) Corporations should prepare for the challenge posed by user-generated videos, along with other materials posted on social media, by being alert all the time. In today's world of modern technology, which has advanced rapidly over the course of 4 1/2 years, it would be shocking not to know the next big incident to occur. Especially with the tweens / early teenagers, who use social media on an almost-constant basis; just one tweet with the right hash-tags could damage any big corporation, just like what happened to United after the fact.