Turning News Into Knowledge

On July 10, I wrote a blog posting called Beware of the viral nature of media.

It dealt with the United Breaks Guitars video, which went viral across the web and mainstream North American media.

Joe Boughner responded to the posting quite rightly questioning how much damage was actually being done to United Airlines’ brand. Joe also hoped that someone would do a six-month post-analysis on the story.

Well, we decided to do a one-month analysis of the United Breaks Guitars story and have some interesting results.

Whether long-term damage was done is still up for debate, especially since our analysis covers only the month of July.

That said, you can find the complete analysis on the Resource Center on the MediaMiser website. You can access it without providing personal information.

For those who don’t want to read it, here are some of the findings, which are backed up by the analysis in the report:

• Even though blogs and Twitter may have alerted traditional media of the story, traditional media outlets supercharged the story and made it a real issue for United Airlines.
• The majority of micro-bloggers (Twitter), tend be heavily influenced by the mainstream media.
• Do not underestimate the influence of blogs.  Even though the popularity of other social media is on the increase, and the number of people writing blogs may be waning, many are still relying on blogs for information.
• Not surprisingly, United Breaks Guitars dominated the news for United Airlines during the month of July.

Chart showing the different media interaction over time.

United Airlines just got a brutal lesson on the viral nature of media.

According to Canadian musician Dave Carroll, United Airlines broke his $3,500 Taylor guitar.  For nine months, he unsuccessfully tried to get United to pay for the repair costs.

So, he took his case online to Youtube with a pretty slick music video called ‘United Breaks Guitars‘.

The video has had over 500,000 views since it was first posted Monday and now United is scrambling.

I was first referred to the video via a story in the Ottawa Citizen by Sarah Schmidt and Blair Crawford.

The term viral in the Ottawa Citizen story was in relation to Youtube and the Internet. However, ironically, as have already stated, I first heard about the story from the Ottawa Citizen – a traditional media outlet.

At last count, the story has appeared in over two hundred traditional outlets and thousands of blogs, which now includes this one.

Also, to add another layer of complexity for United,  when viewing the video on Youtube, you are given other anti-United videos to chose from, including a pretty funny Madtv skit.

Viral stories can jump medium to medium and organizations need to be more effective when monitoring and analyzing media as a whole and they need to be able to correlate the different media to one another.

In the case of ‘United Breaks Guitars’, all United can do is apologize and show humility, which they are doing. The video is too well done and has momentum.

I would also recommend that they analyze the ongoing situation and aftermath, so they can better understand what happened and try to figure out how they can repair some of the damage.

That said, they seem to be saying the right things to the media and they need to make sure they stay on message and show humility.

Again, to make sure they are being successful with their attrition, they should be constantly monitoring and analyzing all media, new and traditional.