A recent story on Reuters claims airlines may be struggling against a new foe in their never-ending PR war: Twitter. Where people were once making phone calls and composing strongly worded letters from the cramped discomfort of a landed airline seat, they’re now blowing off unmitigated steam on social sites like Twitter.
I opened the story because I thought it might have a nice spin on making Twitter useful. I know the service has its uses, but I find them to be few and far between for the average user. As it turns out, it’s not Twitter that seems to be doing the talking to the airlines, it’s things like Dave Carroll’s YouTube song, United Breaks Guitars. The song, which Carroll wrote after United broke a guitar and failed to take responsibility, went viral, and urged a quick response from the airline. United donated some money in Carroll’s name to a music foundation.
So Carroll makes music, United breaks Carroll’s instrument of choice, Carroll can’t make music without his instrument of choice, United donates money to help more people get better at making music – is this really the course of action we’re after? Seems to me United is trying to say, “Oh we didn’t break that guitar because we hate music. We love music. We want more people to make music.” But making music was never the issue. The issue was how some United worker mishandled Carroll’s luggage. So why is United donating to a music foundation? Why not employee dexterity training? What about emotional intelligence courses to increase worker empathy? Hell, why not just pay your handlers more for not breaking your customer’s belongings? I would take anything, anything but a donation to a god damn music foundation.
What we need to realize as a collective customer base is that United is more like the detached, loaded father who still thinks we were one big mistake than a company that knows its business. See, Dad knows what bitching sounds like, and when it happens he throws a pile of money at it. Bitch some more, get a car. Bitch some more, get a new watch. Bitch some more, get a credit card. What dad doesn’t understand are the words coming out of our mouths. He doesn’t know, or more appropriately, doesn’t care to know the real problem, so he addresses it however he sees fit, which is usually some non sequitur of epic proportions.
I realize I got a little off track there, but all of this is to say that none of our complaints, whether they’re through Twitter or on YouTube or Facebook or anything else, matter one bit if companies like United can’t figure out how to handle them. Christi Day, the woman behind the Facebook and Twitter profiles for Southwest airlines, wants you to know one thing: “The main thing that our customers need to know is that we hear them.” And it seems they do. They hear the noise we’re making, they just fail to understand the words.
The internet can be a wild beast for a tech company’s PR efforts. The ravenous desire for the latest screenshots and the best story means issues can get blown out of proportion pretty quickly. Remember that white iPhone that overheated and turned brown? That thing started a shitstorm of controversy that even non-tech folks heard about. I had a regular from a bar I used to work at ask me, on seeing my iPhone, if I’d had “any of those overheating problems.” This is a guy who didn’t know what a hard drive was and had trouble operating his old Nokia candybar. Nonetheless, he’d heard of the problem and was more than willing to share.
