Do you remember the catchy song, "United Breaks Guitars"? Did United Airlines forgot about that incident from 2008 that was made into a song in 2009 by a customer whose guitar was broken while he flew with them? The video has been seen more than 14 million times in the past 5 years.
The latest social media incident to hit United Airlines is a photo of a dog sitting on the tarmac in the Houston, Texas airport while it is raining. While the angle of the photo makes it hard to discern how wet the dog was getting, the optics don't look good. The initial Tweet about the incident was ret-tweeted more than fifteen hundred times and then re-tweeted by countless others. In addition, news organizations around the world such as The Daily Mail, and The New York Daily News, The New York Post, etc... picked up the story and wrote about it.
The bottom line is that companies large and small must realize that one wrong move can create a major negative pubic relations event. Will this harm United's bottom line? Most likely not since the entire industry is seeing record profits, and now that oil prices are falling airline profits are soaring ever higher.
While this social media incident may not hurt United Airline's financially, due to current market conditions, it has become part and parcel of its history the next time a social media incident occurs. Therefore, it is imperative to ensure that employees are trained in how to properly deal with social media incidents.
Copyright 2014 by Shear Law, LLC All rights reserved.
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