Social media &
How one video in Youtube can cause millions in brand damage
Filed under: Brands, Social Media
Passengers trapped aboard a grounded airliner isn’t something new – in fact it has happened for decades and nobody has seemed to care. People forgot the incident fast, but the reason they were forgotten was that people didn’t have the means to tell the story. Until now. A passenger recording the unpleasant incident and uploading the video on Youtube is a new kind of threat, and a very powerful one indeed.
When Virgin America’s plane had to make an unplanned landing due to weather, passengers were left trapped inside the grounded airplane for hours. David Martin, one of the passengers on plane, decided to record the whole incident and share it with others on his social media account.
After the first announcements of an unplanned landing, he sent out the first messages. Soon after that, he started recording the incident with a cell phone, capturing the growing nervousness even among the flight crew.
His video has been spiraling on the web for five days now, gaining over 70 000 views since uploading. No doubt that it will be a headache for Virgin in months to come, since videos like that will usually stay circulating for a long time. Taking out fires in social media is something they didn’t teach us at school, but it’s certainly something worth knowing now.
In today’s world of ever-expanding social media, a reputation that took years to build, can be destroyed buy the guy in front with a video camera. So paying good attention to your front line will certainly pay dividends in the long run.
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Posted on: March 19, 2010
