Unilever Breaks Guitars

United´s response. Did the airline handle the incident well?
This case is a clear example of viral marketing. In fact, in December 2009 Time magazine placed the first song at No. 7 ranking of "Top10 Viral Videos of 2009"1. The massive use of internet has made possible for consumers to receive as well as to share information and even become actors in the network. The possibilities offered bythe different platforms are immense and beyond (for now, the future is unpredictable) to any possibility of control by the companies of the information circulating on the network. For this reason a bigeffort is required by companies to be alert to any change and innovation that occurs in the network, integrating the company's strategy.
What happened whit the guitar could be understood as anaccident, but the later bureaucracy to put the claim and all the delays are unacceptable for a company like this. To this we have to add the response to the viral video, in my opinion this response was tooslow and too improvised. The facts indicate that they didn´t evaluate the situation and the response was not planned, they tried to solve the problem directly with the affected when the damage wasalready done and giving the impression of simply be trying to silence the protest and removing the videos as soon as possible. On the other hand, the answers that were given were completelyuncoordinated showing a lack of focus in the problem. In a few words the response instead of helping to solve the problem enlarged it.
In this particular case, things could have done differently. The communitymanager should have had detected the viral video before, they should have had planned a response strategy coordinating all the answers and communications. They could have used this incident to show howconcerned they were about what happened to this person and how concerned they were about improving all the procedures but they didn´t. This all happened because maybe underestimated the potential...