Power to the People: Dave vs United Airlines

While News Limited and others have decided to soon charge for the news and debate on the subject “to charge or not to charge” continues, the Blogosphere has proved a crucial point much ignored in that debate. The news is not owned by news organisations, and very often, what we consider news is ignored, so what they are delivering is not necessarily something for which people are willing to pay.

1. The newspapers tend to focus on what they determine to be the major news stories. That formula remained unchallenged and unchanged for decades. However, consumer sentiment to the drivel served up on radio and TV of late has shown a marked change in what people want to see, hear and read. What is of interest to the market/audience is not necessarily what is being delivered.

2. They don’t own what happens – rarely are they even there to capture it. But consumers are. They are there on the ground with mobile phone cameras and video recorders, Twitter accounts and fast fingers, leading, delivering and indeed now driving world news.

3. However much the heads of news organisations rant negatively about it; however much they insult and dismiss it, what happens in the Blogosphere IS now the news. With 23 million people per month engaged in conversation on Twitter, 85 million on YouTube and 122 million on Facebook, it has to. These are numbers the news organisations have never attained in subscriptions to print or online editions of their own material and cannot be ignored. See Compete.com for more.

Twitter led the Iranian election fall out and the meltdown of Twitter itself led the mainstream news last week. But headlining for the past few weeks has been Dave Carroll. Dave (as you would all know by now) had the misfortune of flying United Airlines a year ago, wherein baggage handlers trashed his prized Taylor guitar. With no recompense or apology from the company forthcoming, Dave did what only a singer can do. He produced a song with music video and uploaded it to YouTube.

We wrote about it here on July 9th: http://www.reputationreport.com.au/2009/07/crm-in-the-twitterverse-and-youtube-world/
Would Dave’s story of “guitar broken by United Airlines” made it onto the news? No. But when Dave wrote a song about it, and people blogged about it, the story spread like wildfire, and saw United’s share price plunge by 10%, wiping $180m off the company’s value.

Dave (checking progress on the soon-to-be-released second song in the photo above) has become the Consumer Generated Media (CGM) poster boy. From his home in Canada last night, Dave reported to Reputation Report that since launching the initial video on July 7th:

• I currently have 4,795,577 hits on YouTube…so much for my dream of hitting 1,000,000 hits in a year
• I have conducted 117 interviews all over North America and around the world including Ireland, UK, Malaysia, Colombia, Brazil, New Zealand and China, just to name a few.
• We are the top rated music video in Canada on YouTube ALL TIME
• I now have 3 people working with me, very strange…
• AND the saga continues…Last Sunday night Air Canada managed to loose my luggage somewhere between Halifax and Denver. I won’t even get into what their claim policy is, though I am tempted to pen it into song 3…

United have now apologised, donated to a charity of Dave’s choice and have been defending themselves ever since.

The reach and impact of Dave taking matters into his own hands is indicative of a world much changed, and a news landscape now foreign to the news organisations that used to own this space. Stay tuned for Dave’s next installment, coming soon.

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Tags: consumer generated media (CGM), corporate behaviour, culture, social media, Twitter, YouTube

Category: Internet as Media, Reputation Management