The Influence of Social Media in Public Relations

Dave Carroll vs. United Airlines

Millions of people have heard songs written by the musician Dave Carroll. For those of you who haven’t heard of him don’t bother listening for his songs on the radio or looking for his CD at Wal-Mart because you won’t find him there. Dave Carroll is famous because of his YouTube music videos. Thanks to social media Dave has been able to use his talents to publically vent, so to speak. Let me explain, in the spring of 2008 Dave and his Taylor guitar made a trip on a United Airlines airplane to Nebraska. While waiting for takeoff Dave witnessed his guitar being thrown around by baggage handlers and later discovered that his $3,500 guitar had been damaged. After 9 months of failed attempts to get United to at least pay for his guitar repair he told them that he would release a series of 3 songs about what happened and post them on YouTube. Carroll invited United to “sit back and enjoy the show” as he posted the first video and watched as his video went viral.
Dave Carroll used his creativity to boost his own public relations and shatter United’s. After the company has lost an estimated $180 million they finally tried to contact Carroll to see if they could pay him to take his videos down. He came out with a response on YouTube that politely said it was too late and that if they wanted to give money to a charity that would be appreciated. United reportedly did donate $3,000 to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz for music education for children, eventually. I fear that for the PR department of United Airlines, this was a little too late. In the words of One Republic, “it’s too late to apologize,” United. The damage has been done. Over 7 million people have heard Dave Carroll’s story and had the chance to listen to his talents and laugh at his movie. My personal opinion is that Dave made a very wise PR move in making this video because not only did he get his point across, he also got his name and music out there. Dave is now on tour and has been on many talk shows; this gave him the opportunity to live his dream.
Social Media such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have become outlets for people to say what they want in creative ways and get their point across. It is so powerful because it can reach countless numbers of people across the world in such short amounts of time. Companies can use these outlets for their benefit but need to make sure that they are also publically addressing the negative social media.
PR has reached a whole new level with social networking and social media. It is very important as a PR professional to realize that social media can make or break an individual or a company and that it is their responsibility to make sure that they know how to use this power for the benefit of their companies.