Guardian Force UK

As part of my job I tend to keep up on what Microsoft, Google and the other big Internet companies announce at TED. I never expected however for Microsoft to unveil something this impressive. Check out this video that demo’s the new functionality of their advanced augmented-reality maps. It’s extremely epic.

If you weren’t impressed by that you should probably stop reading now. (more…)

This is a pretty funny story about a guy who wrote a song to bitch at United Airline, an American air transport company and how it played out for the better in the end. It was originally posted as an entry on my work blog but I thought you guys would also like to hear about it.

Social Media PR disasters have happened quite a few times recently, many companies have had embarrassing things accused about them or worse, proven about them, on sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. The  RyanAir and Dominos Pizza cases really come to mind and bad handling of a social media PR storm cost these companies a lot.

This story is a little different; this is about the United Airlines company handling of a problem that happened to a dude named Dave Carroll. Short story is that UA baggage handlers damaged his guitar while on a short flight. We all joke about rough baggage guys but guitars are expensive as well as obviously fragile and the baggage handlers really should have known better.

A year of chasing them later and Carroll decided that he would tell the world his problems, so he and his band put together a song and video and put it on YouTube. It’s embedded below.

It’s really funny and well put together and a deeper background of the song is available on his own blog.

Obviously this is a huge embarrassment for UA, they have a company Twitter profile that was basically bombed with RT of this video and the video itself has thousands of comments and a full 5 star rating.

At this point a fairly big SEM agency named SEOMoz featured a post about management of this type of problem and how so many companies don’t take social media seriously etc. It’s a very good post which I recommend you read if you are into SEM and online marketing but the crux was that UA should take this as a marketing opportunity, get in touch with him and make sure everyone knows you are doing what you can to rectify it.

Well it seems someone paid attention because shortly after they did contact him and since then have taken several positive steps for both themselves and customers. Dave did a video response here .

The company offered a decent amount of compensation which Dave has diverted to charity and the company have gone as far to actually use the song as a training video according to Twitter. There are also talks of a follow-up song made in co-operation with the two.

Fantastic move by UA and great initial effort from Dave and his friends. Social media management is becoming a necessity in today’s business world and case studies like this should be shown to all the “savvy” marketing guys heading up multinationals.

E-mail for the “Google Generation”?

Not really much to say in the post, this video has to be watched to be believed.