kristina

Crisis communication plans are of utmost importance to any kind of company, because no matter how low the chance of something unexpected happening, just having the chance there is a heavy enough burden.  Without crisis communication plans, the stress level would be even higher for certain companies about how to act in certain situations. This summer, there was a crisis that United Airlines had to deal with.  They might not have handled this situation with the best crisis communication plan, but it gives us a glimpse at how people can use social media to their advantage and make a powerful company have a crisis.

United Airlines was “charged” with mishandling a passenger’s (David Carol’s) guitar. While they were loading the luggage, he saw them throw his $3500 guitar on the luggage belt.  He told the flight attendants, but they failed to do anything.  Then, when he arrived at the destination airport, he confirmed the damages.  Later, he called the airline’s phone number to file a complaint and damage charges, but they didn’t do anything about it.  Three months later, he made a youtube video and was noticed.  Within days this video was noticed by many publics-not just the general public, but major publications such as the LA Times.  There were a lot of blogs about it as well.  In a matter of a week, over three million viewers had seen this video.  It was time that United Airlines do something about this outbreak before it became worse.  They were getting A LOT of free press, but very bad press.  On July 7th, United Airlines “tweeted” about this video, saying they had contacted David.  And, David made another Youtube video in response to them.  Later on, he made one more song for United Airlines, which talks more about the airline hostess that he asked to help out.

I searched for more apology statements to the press and to David Carol, but I only ran across the Tweet.  While looking at someone else’s evaluation of how United performed this crisis communication plan, I learned that they did not enact one very well.  They called Mr. Carol personally, and the terms they came to were that they would donate a certain sum of money to a charity.  But after doing only that, they decided to just used the video as a learning experience and to use it internally to learn how to train the luggage handlers and airline stewards.

This is an example of a poor execution of a crisis communication plan, but a great example of how social media can be used for the power of the people against a large company, and how fast social media works.  It connects people from across the country on a certain topic that they would have never known about unless it was for the powerful tool of networking and communicating with social media.