United Breaks Guitars is a great example of what social media can do for customer service.  David Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell, illustrate with this song and video just what can be done when social media is used to express grievances.  Today when I first saw this video – having seen it posted by a friend of mine, Jason Crawford, on Facebook, already had over 3 million views and over 15 thousand comments.  News channels and web pages are reporting on in today all over the place so I expect the number to just increase.  United has already responded to David about the incident and has tried to make amends… the damage is done though and perhaps they will make some changes due to the incident.  (Click here for more information from David)

My point in posting this though is to highlight the change that is happening in business due to social media.  Social media makes it so any one’s voice can be heard by millions.  You do not have to be famous or clever, or even a good song writer like Carroll.  All you need is just a little on line presence to make your voice heard through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or whatever and you can make an impact.  For business this means they can no longer sluff you off and ignore treating you right.  Customer service is key in this world today thanks to social media; some like Zappos.com get it, others like United do not.  It also means that business need to understand this change in dynamic or they could get burned… Just like United.