Why do you think Dave Carroll's video spread so fast to so many people?

The campaign was very well handled by Carroll & his friends. The reasons of success are:

Simultaneous & effective use of social media by them which includes twitter, Digg & othersocial sites which have the voting option Tweet to the persons who had the similar experience spread a sort of buzz effect Immediate pickup by the websites like Consumerist.com, Los Angeles travel section etc. whodeal with customer satisfaction & travel respectively The reporting of the video by these sites further brought the video in limelight and hitscontinued Reporting of the incident by the mainstream media further brought the matter in general publics eyes Bob Taylor also leveraged upon the opportunity and supported the campaign

How do you evaluate the airline's response? What would you have done different in this position? The airline's response was more on the negative side because of the following reasons: Issued a sincere apology, sprinkled in some humour, and even came out and said that theywanted to use this video for Training Purposes United was selective in the type of media they used to respond to the incident While they answered journalist queries, they did not address it on its website or on its Youtube channel Next day another video was updated on YouTube with Carroll acknowledging the apology butonly 200,000 people viewed it which was actually only 5% of the people watching the otherone Should have issued their own humorous You Tube response The airlines belated decision to donate $3,000 to the lonious Monk Institute of Jazz as a gesture of goodwill(Carroll said he was beyond the point of accepting money) did nothing to contain the damage

WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE: To tackle such a problem the company should have a dedicated person/team who reportssuch an incident and the matter to be addressed immediately but after planning andstrategizing Mere apologizing would not satisfy the people who are talking about the service failure, thecompany should take some tangible actions like change in the training procedures or actionplan in this case The tangible action should be promoted as an answer to the mass who are spreadingnegative publicity Learning from the mistake and fixing it will help the corporation Assuring the customer of not repeating the mistake Provide compensation to the affected person