I’m lumping United Airlines and Twitter into one big category because they both have faced a possible social media PR issue.  

In the case of United Airlines, you might have already heard of “United Breaks Guitars”, the story of a Canadian band and their trials & tribulations at Chicago O’Hare airport.  One guitar was broken and they got tangled up in red tape.  At least according to the band’s song, they did everything right and United wouldn’t step up and solve the problem.

I was one who jumped right on the band wagon along with “Sons of Maxwell” when the song came out.  Why not?  The song was catchy, the lyrics clever and the lead singer has a great voice.  Is the story true?  I have absolutely no idea and chances are no one who is spear-heading the anti-United campaign knows either.  What we do know is that United did nothing about it.  

There are two schools of thought about that.  (1) There is concept that any publicity is good publicity.  Look at the Trump-O’Donnell feud.  It helped ratings for both of them.  Heck, I wonder if I could pick a fight with Trump?  As long as he didn’t sue me (and bury me in legal fees), it would certainly be exposure!  On the other hand, I don’t want the hassle.  But some people might see picking on a big company as a way to get your name in the press.  And if your belief system is any publicity is good publicity, then this could work.  So, if that’s the case and you’re United - what do you do?  (2) In today’s world, the Internet has a long memory and anybody who knows how to do a YouTube video or write a blog and especially if they understand how to build SEO & could get something pasted across 1000 website in no time flat, you could buried in bad press quickly.  So, every customer complaint could be deadly to your business.  Deal with them fast.   But, does that mean you give into customer service blackmail?  Where do you draw the line?

Now, let’s look at Twitter over the past two weeks.  Twitter has grown very fast, probably too fast according to some critics. And the spammers are there in force now.  If you’re on Twitter, I’m sure you know exactly what I mean.  ”Grow your account by 16,000 followers in just 30 days”  ”Make $300 per day on Twitter” and on and on.   They don’t give any content, just a lot of spam.

Two weeks ago Twitter did something about it.  Using some automated programs they got rid of the spammers.  And like any program out there, there were some glitches.  At least two people that I know got their accounts wiped out and suspended.  One was someone I know because we travel in similar circles.  She had a big following at 15,000+ people.  Gone in a night.  Her account was suspended as well, so she couldn’t grow it back. 

She sent out a shout out to a few of the people she knew with decent sized accounts to tell us what had happened.  She had posted on Twitter’s forum, sent numerous “slips” for customer service and no response.  

The CEO/founder of Twitter goes by @ev on the Twitter boards.  She kept posting comments to @ev asking for help, but no response.  I know what it’s like to feel helpless and I hate that feeling more than anything, so jumped into the fray.  My friend wrote a blog post outlining exactly what had happened.  I did a tweet saying something about @ev needs to pay attention to a Twitter mistake with a link to the blog post.  

And, in a move that floored me, @ev responded to me in his timeline.  (That means it went out to his 1.3 million followers).  He said he’d look into it and he said my name (which was cool).

He looked into it alright, within 2 hours it was fixed.

Besides the comments from friends (like:  ”Oh, I see the CEO of Twitter is now reporting to you.”) it was great to see his responsiveness.  I’m certain there was nothing deliberate here.  It was just a goof and I imagine he had gotten flooded with complaints from spammers.  It wasn’t until someone outside the spam label stepped in that there was real attention given to what was going on.  

And I got about 300 new followers inside of about 15 minutes of the posting.  So, any publicity IS good publicity.  But when it’s actually for a greater purpose, it feels that much better. 

My friend has been lavish with her praise and thanks to @ev and the Twitter crew.  Another smart move by her.  This isn’t the time for the “I told you so” dance. Let Twitter get the props, as they should, for fixing a problem. That’s just smart business.

And what have learned from the lessons of United and Twitter?   Pay attention to problems when you can.  Fix it if you can. 

And the questions I don’t know the answers to:  What if it’s not your problem?  What if you can’t fix it?