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Does anyone remember the song “United Breaks Guitar” from Dave Carroll? This is the story of a guitar player who’s flying with United Airlines. His guitar is broken by agents on the ground, and United Airlines doesn’t want to pay for the damages. The artist creates a song depicting the poor quality of customer service at United. The song is uploaded on YouTube and becomes an instant hit…within 4 days of the song going online, United’s stock price falls 10%, allegedly costing shareholders a $180M. After months of fruitless negotiations and 3 songs being released on YouTube, United’s management finally decided to reimburse the passenger.
This is just one out of a dozen of examples of companies struggling to understand the impact of social media in our day to day lives. Thriving companies are just beginning to measure the impact of social platforms when analyzing behaviors of prospects and learning or shaping customers opinions. And companies who don’t feel the need to decrypt new communication patterns and leverage this knowledge may lack with time some competitive edge…
On December 2nd, at noon, the Center for Digital Strategies is very fortunate to host Josh Bernoff, Senior VP at Forrester, (also co-author of Groundswell and Empowered). Josh will explain not only how companies should manage their customer relations, but also how customers and empowered workers are influencing these companies – sometimes even by re-defining their marketing strategy. Enjoy!