Internet Marketing: United's lesson on how to get WOM terribly wrong

United Airlines has a lesson to teach us: How to turn a case of bad customer service into a snowballing negative PR case. After being the star of a musical rant by an angry customer whose guitar was destroyed by personnel, they made headlines again by losing his luggage and... get this: just when he was arriving at a conference about customer service, where he was going to tell his story.

Dave Carroll was on a United Airlines plane last year when he said he saw baggage handlers carelessly throw his $9,000 guitar around the airport. He later found that it was damaged and demanded compensation from United. After a year of calls and dead-ends he gave up and wrote a song about it. The video, uploaded on Youtube has had almost 6 million viewers and the song, "United breaks guitars" is available on iTunes. Last week, Carroll was traveling to a conference on social networking and customer service, where he was going to play the song and tell his story. He says that the audience laughed when they heard what had happened.

Though the internet has been around for over 15 years, companies are still struggling to get internet marketing right. Some have hired GenYers or a PR company to set up a Twitter account. Others have gone on Facebook and are sending their executives to conferences on Social Media marketing. Others are limiting themselves to ignoring Social media altogether, and are just sticking to a webpage.

But when companies think of internet marketing they think Marcoms: ads, getting fans on Facebook, etc. and forget some of the basics. Internet changes the way that people interact with your company, or the touchpoints. United ignored this customer and channeled him through their usual, highly bureaucratic, painful, telephone customer service center. The reason that the song has become such a hit is that so many people feel the same way (I had a wheel taken off a suitcase in a recent trip to China by another airline). Maybe overhauling baggage handling will be hard an expensive... but this case makes you think: did United really need to take a whole year to face this?

The internet can give customers a sense of empowerment, especially when cases like this become so famous. But many companies want to play the game the way they've always been playing it. Unfortunately, no mobile apps, Facebook ads or email newsletters can compensate a strategy that doesn't attack the heart of the problem: improving your product and the customer's experience of it.

I'll write more about this in an upcomming book review: "What Would Google Do?"