dave and his guitar have been getting press. lots of it.

if you don’t know the story, dave is in a band and united didn’t take very good care of the equipment he checked during a flight. after 9 months of trying to get united to pay for the damages and united refusing, dave is serenading them with what can’t be called a love song. check out the dave’s video called ‘united breaks guitars‘ on youtube.

as i write this, the video has almost 3 million views. it seems CNN, NPR and CBS have run stories. he’s being interviewed for rolling stone. the viral started by dave sending an email to his friends.

everyone has gotten the message by now – it might even be sinking in at united considering their tweets over the last couple days state they have donated money as per dave’s request. they claim they will use the video in training and they have learned from their mistake. but it doesn’t feel very sincere, does it?

i don’t see anything on the united.com website. there doesn’t seem to be a response on youtube. no post on twitter directing you to a page which explains exactly what they did, how they messed up and what this training and learning impact will be.

i fly united a bit. have a lot of freq flyer miles with them. i know they’re not an amazing airline but in my experience they’re not any worse than other airlines (i know, such an endorsement!). dave’s treatment doesn’t make me want to fly with them and i wonder if they recognise that damage is occurring.

oh! one other thing united (if you’re listening), the promotion you’re running… of getting 50,000 number of twitter followers by july 17 to give x% discount is sending a bad message. it tells me you only want masses of numbers and you will treat me as such (just like you treated dave). perhaps this is why you haven’t hit the follower targets? (currently at 16,854 on july 15).