YouTube giveth, and YouTube taketh away. And one irate musician has used it to do both, taking a few inches of skin off United Airlines for its baggage-handling practices and poor customer relations, but giving a California guitar maker a chance to win some major brand awareness and some points for attending to its users’ needs.

The story in a nutshell: In March Dave Carroll, Halifax-born front man for the alt-country band The Sons of Maxwell, and his group were sitting in a United plane at O’Hare waiting for the luggage to be loaded and the doors to close. One of the other passengers said something like, “Hey look, they’re throwing guitars.” He looked out the window, and sure enough, a baggage handler was treating his $3,500Taylor guitar the Olympic shot put treatment. He complained to the flight attendant and the gate agent but got stonewalled. And sure enough, when the band arrived at their Omaha gig, the guitar was badly damaged and unplayable.

Nine months of bureaucratic runaround ensued, including e-mail from a customer rep that said since Carroll hadn’t filed a complaint in Chicago, United was not responsible. Oh, it was also requested that he bring the guitar in for inspection. To Chicago. From Halifax, Nova Scotia.

So Carroll got creative with his revenge. Specifically, he wrote a song, “United Breaks Guitars,” shot a video around it, and put the clip up on YouTube. The video went up on July 9, 2009. To date, it has received 3.5 million views.

It has also received press attention from national papers such as USAToday and the Wall Street Journal, as well as being featured on CNN (both regular broadcasts and Wolf Blitzer’s program) and the Today Show.

All in all, a publicity meltdown for United, starting with the song’s title and going all the way through several repetitions of the chorus.

On the other hand, it’s great publicity for Taylor Guitars, the El Cajon CA-based company that is just celebrating its 35th year in business. For one thing, the brand name is featured in the lyrics almost as often as United is. And for another, the fact that someone would go to this amount of trouble to get restitution for a damaged instrument says a lot about how highly they value it.

YouTube is giving Taylor a chance to build both brand awareness and customer bonds, and the company is taking it—being careful not to look like it’s capitalizing on a player’s misfortune.

Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell have been featured artists for Taylor since 2000 and were in the fall 2008 issue of the company’s owner magazine, Wood and Steel. But when it came to learning about the United incident, “We were just as surprised as everyone else to see the video,” says company spokesperson Chalise Zolezzi. “We were happy that the world got to see what we’ve always known—that Dave and his bandmates are great musicians.”

Of course, it hasn’t done Taylor’s brand recognition any harm either. “People who play Taylors are passionate,” Zolezzi said. “We’ve known that, and now other people are discovering that.”

When it came to building on this exposure that Carroll and his band and Taylor were getting, the company decided to make a more sober customer-service play. Taylor founder and CEO Bob Taylor recorded a short video standing in the company’s new guitar repair center on their campus, and he offers both sympathy to Carroll and some useful tips on traveling by plane with guitars: primarily, take them on board and print out the TSA instructions that permit you to do so.

“The sad truth is that for every story like Dave’s, there are hundreds if not thousands of others we’ve heard over the course of our 35 years,” Zolezzi says. “So we felt we could help with a video response from Bob Taylor that supported Dave and offered some tips. We’ve been covering traveling with guitars since 2003 in our magazine and on our Web site, issuing advice about TSA policies and the specific policies of different airlines. So this was nothing new to us.”

Nor was video. Taylor has a YouTube channel , using it to post demos and instructional videos about guitar construction and live performances of artists using their products. Bob Taylor has made several of these videos himself and needed no persuasion to get in front of the camera for the short two-minute response video, nor did he need any kind of script, Zolezzi says.

“We just turned it on and he spoke from the heart,” she says.

Even better, Taylor had only opened its factory service center three months before. So Taylor was able to express his support standing in front of an apparently bustling guitar repair workshop.

While it has not racked up anything like 3.5 million views, the Taylor response video has done reasonably well since posting to YouTube on July 10 of this year, garnering 59,000 views. The video comes up high in the “Related Videos” listed next to the Dave Carroll original, although it has dropped down in the course of a week as users flood in with their own newer response videos—always a factor when customer complaint stories get lots of press.

Still, the Taylor video has gotten three pages of comments, overwhelmingly as enthusiastic as, “Dang I’m buying a Taylor just on general principle!”

The story continues today, when Carroll and a bandmate are scheduled to pay a visit to the company’s headquarters. Zolezzi says it’s expected he’ll bring the maltreated instrument along; while it has already been repaired by another craftsperson, Taylor will see if they can do anything to improve its condition.

Oh, and here’s the rest of the story, as the late Paul Harvey would say. Dave Carroll posted a spoken video on July 10 to announce that he and United Airlines were talking about compensation terms.—“generously but late,” as he points out.

That settlement appears to be a $3,000 donation to the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz for children’s music education, according to a solitary tweet on the United Airlines Twitter page. One of the relatively few Carroll-related official posts on the United page says the company “wud like Dave 2 sing a happy tune” now that he’s gotten some satisfaction.

They say they’ll also use the Carroll video for training purposes.

But as blogger Dan Greenfield points out in Social Media Today , United’s response to the huge popularity of the Dave Carroll video has basically been way too little, coming far too late and delivered via entirely the wrong media, namely the traditional press. As of last Monday, the airline offered 9 tweets about the video and its charges, compared to a virtually uncountable flood elsewhere on Twitter.

United also has a YouTube channel. And at press time, while you could watch two-year-old United commercials on the site, you’d look in vain for any kind of corporate response to the Carroll complaints—although plenty of negative customer comments (“Boycott United!!!”) were easily found, all referencing “United breaks Guitars” video.

It’s really a basic rule: You have to respond to the problem in the medium in which the complaint originated, whatever other media you use, or you’ll be perceived as not responding at all. YouTube viewers and Twitter users don’t all read newspapers, unfortunately. Whatever agreement they have reached with Carroll himself, the company has botched the PR portion of its response.

The additional irony in United’s bungling is that the company has apparently just concluded a drive to amass Twitter followers, offering sign-ups who are also Mileage Plus members a travel discount certificate if they reached 50,000 followers by July 17. In other words, they’re interested in gathering a crowd; they’re just not showing themselves to be very interested in engaging with that crowd other than handing down marketing messages when it suits their purposes.

As for Carroll himself, he’s said that “United Breaks Guitars” is just the first in a trilogy of songs about the guitar-tossing incident, and that the other two will also make it onto YouTube. So this isn’t over for him, for Taylor Guitars, or for United– to whom we wish good luck with that new Twitter following.

YouTube giveth, and YouTube taketh away. And one irate musician has used it to do both, taking a few inches of skin off United Airlines for its baggage-handling practices and poor customer relations, but giving a California guitar maker a chance to win some major brand awareness and some points for attending to its users’ needs.

The story in a nutshell: In March Dave Carroll, Halifax-born front man for the alt-country band The Sons of Maxwell, and his group were sitting in a United plane at O’Hare waiting for the luggage to be loaded and the doors to close. One of the other passengers said something like, “Hey look, they’re throwing guitars.” He looked out the window, and sure enough, a baggage handler was treating his $3,500Taylor guitar the Olympic shot put treatment. He complained to the flight attendant and the gate agent but got stonewalled. And sure enough, when the band arrived at their Omaha gig, the guitar was badly damaged and unplayable.

Nine months of bureaucratic runaround ensued, including e-mail from a customer rep that said since Carroll hadn’t filed a complaint in Chicago, United was not responsible. Oh, it was also requested that he bring the guitar in for inspection. To Chicago. From Halifax, Nova Scotia.

So Carroll got creative with his revenge. Specifically, he wrote a song, “United Breaks Guitars,” shot a video around it, and put the clip up on YouTube. The video went up on July 9, 2009. To date, it has received 3.5 million views.

It has also received press attention from national papers such as USAToday and the Wall Street Journal, as well as being featured on CNN (both regular broadcasts and Wolf Blitzer’s program) and the Today Show.

All in all, a publicity meltdown for United, starting with the song’s title and going all the way through several repetitions of the chorus.

On the other hand, it’s great publicity for Taylor Guitars, the El Cajon CA-based company that is just celebrating its 35th year in business. For one thing, the brand name is featured in the lyrics almost as often as United is. And for another, the fact that someone would go to this amount of trouble to get restitution for a damaged instrument says a lot about how highly they value it.

YouTube is giving Taylor a chance to build both brand awareness and customer bonds, and the company is taking it—being careful not to look like it’s capitalizing on a player’s misfortune.

Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell have been featured artists for Taylor since 2000 and were in the fall 2008 issue of the company’s owner magazine, Wood and Steel. But when it came to learning about the United incident, “We were just as surprised as everyone else to see the video,” says company spokesperson Chalise Zolezzi. “We were happy that the world got to see what we’ve always known—that Dave and his bandmates are great musicians.”

Of course, it hasn’t done Taylor’s brand recognition any harm either. “People who play Taylors are passionate,” Zolezzi said. “We’ve known that, and now other people are discovering that.”

When it came to building on this exposure that Carroll and his band and Taylor were getting, the company decided to make a more sober customer-service play. Taylor founder and CEO Bob Taylor recorded a short video standing in the company’s new guitar repair center on their campus, and he offers both sympathy to Carroll and some useful tips on traveling by plane with guitars: primarily, take them on board and print out the TSA instructions that permit you to do so.

“The sad truth is that for every story like Dave’s, there are hundreds if not thousands of others we’ve heard over the course of our 35 years,” Zolezzi says. “So we felt we could help with a video response from Bob Taylor that supported Dave and offered some tips. We’ve been covering traveling with guitars since 2003 in our magazine and on our Web site, issuing advice about TSA policies and the specific policies of different airlines. So this was nothing new to us.”

Nor was video. Taylor has a YouTube channel , using it to post demos and instructional videos about guitar construction and live performances of artists using their products. Bob Taylor has made several of these videos himself and needed no persuasion to get in front of the camera for the short two-minute response video, nor did he need any kind of script, Zolezzi says.

“We just turned it on and he spoke from the heart,” she says.

Even better, Taylor had only opened its factory service center three months before. So Taylor was able to express his support standing in front of an apparently bustling guitar repair workshop.

While it has not racked up anything like 3.5 million views, the Taylor response video has done reasonably well since posting to YouTube on July 10 of this year, garnering 59,000 views. The video comes up high in the “Related Videos” listed next to the Dave Carroll original, although it has dropped down in the course of a week as users flood in with their own newer response videos—always a factor when customer complaint stories get lots of press.

Still, the Taylor video has gotten three pages of comments, overwhelmingly as enthusiastic as, “Dang I’m buying a Taylor just on general principle!”

The story continues today, when Carroll and a bandmate are scheduled to pay a visit to the company’s headquarters. Zolezzi says it’s expected he’ll bring the maltreated instrument along; while it has already been repaired by another craftsperson, Taylor will see if they can do anything to improve its condition.

Oh, and here’s the rest of the story, as the late Paul Harvey would say. Dave Carroll posted a spoken video on July 10 to announce that he and United Airlines were talking about compensation terms.—“generously but late,” as he points out.

That settlement appears to be a $3,000 donation to the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz for children’s music education, according to a solitary tweet on the United Airlines Twitter page. One of the relatively few Carroll-related official posts on the United page says the company “wud like Dave 2 sing a happy tune” now that he’s gotten some satisfaction.

They say they’ll also use the Carroll video for training purposes.

But as blogger Dan Greenfield points out in Social Media Today , United’s response to the huge popularity of the Dave Carroll video has basically been way too little, coming far too late and delivered via entirely the wrong media, namely the traditional press. As of last Monday, the airline offered 9 tweets about the video and its charges, compared to a virtually uncountable flood elsewhere on Twitter.

United also has a YouTube channel. And at press time, while you could watch two-year-old United commercials on the site, you’d look in vain for any kind of corporate response to the Carroll complaints—although plenty of negative customer comments (“Boycott United!!!”) were easily found, all referencing “United breaks Guitars” video.

It’s really a basic rule: You have to respond to the problem in the medium in which the complaint originated, whatever other media you use, or you’ll be perceived as not responding at all. YouTube viewers and Twitter users don’t all read newspapers, unfortunately. Whatever agreement they have reached with Carroll himself, the company has botched the PR portion of its response.

The additional irony in United’s bungling is that the company has apparently just concluded a drive to amass Twitter followers, offering sign-ups who are also Mileage Plus members a travel discount certificate if they reached 50,000 followers by July 17. In other words, they’re interested in gathering a crowd; they’re just not showing themselves to be very interested in engaging with that crowd other than handing down marketing messages when it suits their purposes.

As for Carroll himself, he’s said that “United Breaks Guitars” is just the first in a trilogy of songs about the guitar-tossing incident, and that the other two will also make it onto YouTube. So this isn’t over for him, for Taylor Guitars, or for United– to whom we wish good luck with that new Twitter following.