Update: United Breaks Guitars
July 12, 2009 – 4:18 pm | by Daryl TayWhen I blogged about this two days after it was posted on Youtube:
two days has just under 15,000 views, just over 4,000 ratings (with an average of 5 stars), over 1,000 comments
Today, six days after it was posted on Youtube:
- just over 2.3 million views
- 19,358 ratings (with an average of 5 stars)
- 12,250 comments
So the initial 15,000 views x 4 minutes of negative engagement is now 2.3million views x 4 minutes of negative engagement.
Since everyone seems to be hung up on using physical world ROI to apply to social media, let’s do this in the reverse situation.
Let’s use the lowest conversion/open rate possible (I’m thinking direct mail with about 1%), I’ll halve that for the internet at 0.5%, which is 115,000 people. If these 115,000 people say “I’m never flying United again”, how much does that translate in negative ROI over each customer’s lifetime at an average of say, one trip a year?
Of course, this isn’t a “scientific” way of calcluating anything. But that’s what we do isn’t it? Buy a million banner ads and hope for a 1% clickthrough rate. This is the same thing, working against you.
Can your company afford that?
Tags: conversion rate, customer lifetime value, direct mail, negative brand coverage, negative brand interaction, open rate, ratings, ROI, united airlines, united breaks guitars, views, youtube
2 Responses to “Update: United Breaks Guitars”
By Jonathan Wong on Jul 13, 2009 | Reply
Just for fun, let’s play devil’s advocate for the moment:
I dare guess that there are probably hundreds of so-called “complaint” videos popping up on YouTube and elsewhere every single week.
Some of them never see the light of day because aside from a few dozen views, they don’t manage to go viral.
Once in a while, you get videos like this United Breaks Guitar song, which is so compelling, it goes viral and gets the 2.3 million views. However, the average Joe that wants to complain about something will not have the musical talent to make this compelling content, and likely any crap video they do come up with will just wither away and never get to see mass distribution.
Now, I am also going to assume that a company of United’s size and complexity has literally thousands of issues to deal with from all fronts. Obviously every company says customer service is important to them, but when resources get scarce in this economy, and you need to prioritize, sometimes somethings just slip through the cracks – like in this case failing to address a customer’s the broken guitar.
If United needed to prioritize and can only address 9 out of 10 customer complaints, there is no consistent way that they can tell upfront which customer complaint they should ignore, since it will cause the “least” social media damage.
So could it be that this time they were just unlucky enough that the customer complaint that fell through the cracks for them just so happened to be a band which created a song which just so happened to go viral on their ass?
Then would a risk management consultant tell them in hindsight that this was a 0.1% chance event (I’m totally making the numbers up), and it should be handled the exact same way next time, since with finite resources you can’t always cater to every 0.1% event that may or may not happen?
Anyway, I have no conclusion. Just felt like rambling on a Sunday night.
By Daryl Tay on Jul 13, 2009 | Reply
@Jonathan Wong: I totally agree with you on the front that everyone has the ability to upload content online and be a broadcasting medium, but I don’t think United (or anyone) should assess how to deal situations on potential social media damage (I know that’s not what you’re saying btw).
I think at the heart of it, they should make *every* customer satisfied. And that’s hard, but that’s how you win, isn’t it?