If you missed it (and I admit I did), United Breaks Guitars is a YouTube music video of a song that a guy wrote about United Airlines breaking his guitar and the terrible customer service he received afterward

Lots of people have seen the video, in fact the guy is now selling the song on iTunes.

In a recent Media Hacks Podcast (great podcast, by the way), they talked about the United Breaks Guitars incident, from the point of view of did it make any changes to United? Probably not. There’s a lot of news out there and even something that goes viral doesn’t reach everyone. And they were bemoaning the fact that the big corporation could just ignore the bad social media press and it would eventually go away.

I think they are looking at it from the wrong side. It doesn’t surprise me that it didn’t create any change in United. United is a huge company that doesn’t really seem to care about their customers, that’s the point the video made.

But I bet it made a huge difference to the guy who made the video (Dave Carroll, by the way) and his band. They took this negative incident and turned it into a positive for themselves by using the skills they have. That’s the potential of the internet. And it’s a pretty funny music video, though maybe a little long for my taste.