More and more cases point to the need for employee social media fluency – and not just for employees within the marketing department. Consider the case of United Airlines. For nine months, various employees within the organization, from flight attendants to gate agents to claims to customer service agents ignored traveling musician Dave Carroll after one of their employees broke his $3,500 guitar. In the end, Dave let at least one of those employee know that he would be
“..writing three songs about United Airlines and my experience in the whole matter. I would then make videos for these songs and share them on YouTube, inviting viewers to vote on their favourite United song. My goal: to get one million hits in one year.”
Dave followed through – and achieved his goal – somewhere in the first few days that the first of the three videos was online.
Within just a few weeks, the video had received 4m views on YouTube alone, as well as 19k comments from people who were not all that friendly toward United Airlines. Why does this make the case that new media fluency needs to be developed outside of the marketing department? Because United’s new media-fueled problem was brewing for nine months before anyone within the marketing department ever heard about it. Now, the ball is in the marketing department’s court to try and salvage the brand. It is also in the court of the branding and leadership folks, who need to figure out why the airline’s stock dropped 10% within four days of the the first video going live.
There are two important aspects of this issue: the ethical and the functional (they are not really separate, of course, but for the sake of this post let’s treat them that way) The ideal ethical response would have been for United to take care of Dave’s claim regardless of his ability to use new media against them. They don’t appear to have done so in this case, so i will leave that alone for now, and move to the functional aspect of this: How would new media fluency outside of United’s marketing department have helped?
Anyone who has spent time on YouTube and who has ever watched Internet sensations “go viral” (spread far and wide) knows that music videos are some of the most likely to spread quickly throughout the Internet. This is especially true on YouTube, a platform whose list of top-viewed videos of all-time consistently includes both amateur and professional music-related videos. So a new media-fluent United customer service department might have therefore seen it as a legitimate threat to their brand when a professional musician tells them directly that he is taking his case against United to YouTube.
At the very least, one of the employees who dealt with Dave would have discretely escalated the issue to a few people within the customer relations department. “Could this guy be for real? What if his video does go viral?” At best, a truly new media fluent staff may have actually seen an opportunity which could have been brought to the marketing department. “Could we pay for this guy’s guitar and ask him to write a positive song about our honesty? Maybe we should be engaging all of the musicians who regularly fly on our airline and who might produce songs for YouTube?”
Chris, I think you raise some really good points with this post. I particularly agree with your overall point–large companies need to be particularly aware of the power and influence of new media, especially as it relates to customer service.
However, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim (or imply) that a threat to go create a viral video based on one’s poor customer service experiences is any more severe than the more run-of-the-mill threats that these customer service agents hear on a regular basis. While, as you said, music videos are more likely to “go viral,” and an accomplished musician has more of the required tools to create a successful viral video, most viral video attempts end in failure.
Take even the best i310 class videos–they don’t get more than a few thousand hits, though not for lack of thought and attention to detail. United can’t treat the threat of creating a retaliatory viral video as some sort of “oh no time to go into damage control mode” situation–most viral videos (like most threats to escalate customer service situations) will go nowhere.
In my opinion, in this case the customer service folks from the airlines only needed to possess a rudimentary awareness of new media (e.g. “this is a valid means of carrying out a retailliation against our company”), which I think is less of an awareness than you are suggesting. Of course, understanding new media on a deeper level doesn’t hurt, but it’s a stretch to say that if the customer service guy had taken i310 United’s stock wouldn’t have dropped
And there’s pretty much *no way* that United’s customer service department would ever be on top of new media to the point where they’d see any customer service THREAT as a potential customer service OPPORTUNITY. That would simply be too awesome for my brain to handle.
Thanks for the comment, Marty. Always good to get critique from smart people!
I completely agree with you that organizations needn’t treat every YouTube threat as an all-hand-on-deck sort of situation. It would only take a few of those folks crying wolf before such threats would be ignored anyways.
I’m not sure i agree, though, with the idea that viral video-related threats are necessarily equal with normal ones (from a marketing/branding/public relations perspective). I think most people who deal with these threats would agree that customer-service-related complaints are not all created equal. There are at least two elements of each threat which, i think, differentiate them (new media or not): a) the person’s influence, and b) the extent through which they can use that influence in communication channels. For example, one client told a funny story about how a very well-known musician (influence) had visited her organization, and then later that evening ridiculed the organization’s customer service practices while giving a concert to many thousands of people (is present in a popular communication channel). I can tell you for sure that the organization was far more concerned about this musician’s complaint because of his meeting these two criteria.
If we use these two factors when comparing a viral video-related threat by a Dave Carroll to the normal “i’m going to tell all three of my friends” phone call threat from me, i am pretty sure one deserves more credence than the other, because a) Dave Carroll is influential enough to be flying around the country giving concerts [e.g., is influential], and b) he has the tools necessary to succeed in viral ways [a quick look at his YouTube page reveals that he is a pretty good musician who has made music videos before] (remember that this is only the functional consideration. ethically, if the company is in the wrong, they should fix the situation regardless of the customer’s influence). Further, doesn’t it feel like a new media-fluent workforce would be better able to make that judgment – and perhaps to find opportunities within the situation?