Illustration by John Weber

In 2008, Canadian musician Dave Carroll saw United Airlines employees manhandling his $3,500 Taylor guitar on the tarmac in Chicago. When he arrived at his destination, the guitar was in pieces. Carroll contacted United customer service multiple times over the course of a year but got nowhere—so in 2009 he produced a music video, “United Breaks Guitars,” and posted it to YouTube. The video went viral, received widespread coverage in traditional media outlets (Wall Street Journal, CNN, and others), and temporarily tanked United’s stock, creating a turning point in how consumers, and companies, viewed the power of social media.

HBS professor emeritus John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld published a case, “United Breaks Guitars”, to delve into the incident’s takeaways for future business leaders. “Until that point, user-generated content on the internet was mostly sneezing pandas and ‘I Can Has Cheezburger?’ cats,” says Kornfeld, a consultant and digital media researcher.

“We got in early on Carroll’s story because Leora is also Canadian—so she saw the chatter on social media before the story went viral,” says Deighton, who also spoke to the Bulletin about the case for an article in the September 2010 issue. “We were able to track the way social media foreshadowed mainstream media and document how, in those days, nothing went really big until mainstream media amplified it.

“Today, things are so different,” Deighton continues. “Social media marketing managers and ‘creators’ now do professionally and at scale what Dave did as an amateur. Campaigns for major brands recruit influencers with followers on social media, often getting better results than from traditional ad campaigns.”

"I think using the humor and the ability to dial into the message made it accessible to everybody," Carroll told a reporter marking the video’s 15th anniversary for Inc.com. "I think it was empowering for people. We've all been there.... And now, all of a sudden, social media was this tool. It was it was a leveling [the] playing ground thing.... I think people were inspired by that."

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