Reflection on Social Media Case 12: United Breaks Guitars

United airlines has a history of having bad service. As they mentioned in the discussion about the 2017 incident with the man getting dragged off of the plane due to an excess amount of passengers, United does not has a good rep. You can check out that incident and the video in this article https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/business/united-flight-passenger-dragged.html  The term “any press is good press” certainly doesn’t go very well with social media. There is a lot of good things that come from social media and things go viral very quick, but the question is, is this thing becoming viral for a positive reason or a negative reason? I think majority of media that is put out is negative media with headlines that catch your attention and to get people to read about it. The things that have gone viral about United Airlines happen to be extremely negative things that have impacted the overall business tremendously. I think the way United handled this situation was actually very good, (besides the fact it took them nearly a year to respond) they said they enjoyed the video and actually asked for permission to show the video to newly hired employees so that this mistake can never occur again. It makes me wonder if these things occur because of improper training or if it is just the people on the job who make stupid mistakes and are not thinking correctly. I can never imagine myself physically dragging someone off of a plane, or even throwing someone’s guitar onto concrete. It just makes me wonder what is going through the minds of these workers. United Airlines is extremely scrutinized in the media as they should be because of these events that have occurred, it is almost like united has a big magnifying glass over their company and one more slip up and it could be the end for the worlds most hated airline. https://www.inc.com/heather-wilde/the-mistake-that-cost-united-airlines-14-billion-in-one-day-twice-and-what-you-.html