Sons of Maxwell, a little know Canadian band, scored a huge hit on United Airlines by making and placing a negative video on YouTube that attracted 9.6 million views.

The dispute over damaged musical instruments, and resulting lack of customer care, drove the band to produce a video capturing in song their plight in receiving no compensation from United Airlines.

United Airlines reputation was seriously damaged by the massive number of views which pushed the dispute into mainstream media, and a huge amount of forwarded emails.

United Airlines, already pegged as a low care, low price carrier, must have lost substantial business from this attack.

The recovery by United Airlines was slow and ill equipped to respond to an online reputation threat.

Justified or not, there is no ‘off’ switch for this kind of attack, or any judgement to whether the attack is fair prior to its mass publication.

The broken guitar could result (in the worst case) in actual job losses, subsequent loss of livelihood for individuals and families, and millions erased from the share value of a major American corporation.

Corporate businesses need to protect themselves from online reputation threats and brand infringement.

This is best achieved through specialist organisations such as FourthMedia who are able to rapidly respond to such threats and deploy online counter measures to lessen the impact and commercial damage to an organisations reputation.

By continually scanning the internet on behalf of the client they are able to detect online reputation threats as they happen and swiftly deploy counter measures to suppress negative content.

We have all been on the receiving end of poor airline customer care, but cyberspace gives any individual the opportunity to turn into a corporate crushing monster that destroys reputations and ultimately wounds the commercial ability to the point where jobs are lost and investments reduced in value.

Major corporate entities have a duty to shareholders to guard against online reputation threats and questions should be asked by shareholders as to the exact strategy that they will employ to counter these threats.

Andrew Scott
Director
FourthMedia

www.onlinereputationmanager.co.nz