In the past year we have seen a lot of social media PR disasters. Any companies have had embarrassing thing accused about them or proven about them on sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. The Dominos Pizza and RyanAir cases stick in my mind particularly well and these poor public relations can cost companies a lot.

This story is a little different however; this is about the United Airlines handling of a complaint made by a guy called Dave Carroll that UA damage his guitar while on a short internal flight. This I am sure has happened to a lot of people but guitars are particularly expensive as well as obviously fragile and the baggage handlers really should have known better.

Anyway after a year of chasing them Dave decided that he world should know of his problems, so he and his band put together a song and video and put it on YouTube.  It’s embedded below.

It’s really funny and well put together and a deeper background of the song is available on his own blog.

Obviously this is a huge embarrassment for UA, they have a company Twitter profile that was basically bombed with RT of this video and the video itself has thousands of comments and a full 5 star rating.

At this point SEOMoz featured a post about management of this type of problem and how so many companies don’t take social media seriously etc. It’s a very good post which I recommend you read but the crux was that UA should take this as a marketing opportunity, get in touch with him and make sure everyone knows you are doing what you can to rectify it.

Well it seems someone paid attention because shortly after they did contact him and since then have taken several positive steps for both themselves and customers.  Dave did a video response here .

The company offered a decent amount of compensation which Dave has diverted to charity and the company have gone as far to actually use the song as a training video according to Twitter. There are also talks of a follow-up song made in co-operation with the two.

Fantastic move by UA and great initial effort from Dave and his friends. Social media management si becoming a necessity in todays business world and case studies like this should be shown to all the “savvy” marketing guys heading up multinationals.