Digitalia | Indianapolis Social Media Marketing

United breaks Guitars gets over 4 million views in 2 weeks

Is United in Dell Hell?

If you haven't seen or heard of the full story of Dave Carol who flew United last year - here's an excerpt from his youtube channel.

Full Story: http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/story... - In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didnt deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise. Follow me at http://twitter.com/DaveCarroll . Video Produced by Curve Productions of Halifax, http://www.curveproductionsinc.com

It's a story that you might have experienced - you fly somewhere, you lose your stuff or it gets damaged - and to make matters worse, the employees in charge pass you off and you ultimately get no compensation and experience great frustration. Only in Dave Carrol's case, he created a music video and its been viewed almost 4.2 million views in just under 2 weeks. People are sharing it online via facebook, twitter, email and more. Frankly, there are probably lots of us all over the world than can empathize with the way this has gone down.

Take a look at the statistics from the video as of July 26th, 2009:

• Total Views: 4,147,798
  
• Comments: 19,131
• Favourites: 20,945
• Ratings: 28,822
• Average rating: 4.94

*This doesn't include partial views, other non-YouTube conversations or comments.

Clearly, United didn't expect this and monitoring the problem via social media couldn't have solved this problem - which points at a larger problem of customer service. Let's face it - United isn't what it was a decade ago and it certainly ain't no Zappos. How will this citizenship journalism affect the complaint process in the future? Should customers be more customer oriented - if for no other reason - fear of this type of backlash? What do you think? Maybe more companies should study Dell's admirable approach after the Jeff Jarvis episode? I think so.

Duncan Alney Facebook | Twitter | Naymz | Blip.fm

4 components of a successful paid search strategy

Interview with Jamie Smith, Engine Ready

Talked with Jamie Smith from Engine Ready recently (sorry about the spotty video. This was recorded on the fly with a flip and not our normal video crew). Anyway, here are the 4 components of a successful paid search strategy

Visibility
Make sure your campaign have visibility with your target audiences.

Ad creative
Ensure that you have the right keywords and that you’ve tested and are measuring the click through rates.

Continuity
You’ll be amazed how many times landing pages have no keyword continuity with the ad creative.

Conversion
Measure the conversions! Look at conversions by campaigns and dig deeper into what is generating the best results.

And make sure you measure these key performance indicators – impressions, click through rate and conversion rate.

So at the end of the day, these are pretty intuitive. Testing is obviously key and measuring by the hour! There are a lot of "haters" when it comes to paid search marketing. I think there is a time and place for a paid strategy especially when your organic strategy isn’t where it needs to be yet.

- Duncan Alney Facebook | Twitter | Naymz