Viral Video Watch: “United Breaks Guitars” : A Lesson In Baggage and Message Handling

July 6:  The band Sons of Maxwell post this video on YouTube, relating their story of how their baggage — and their complaint — was mishandled by United Airlines:

(hat tip to Tricia M)

July 7:  The video immediately takes off, tray tables stowed and locked and seatbacks in the upright position, with over 50,000 views in the 24 hours. With its catchy country tune, the band seems to have tapped into people’s feeling about large airlines in general, and United Airlines in particular.  United Airlines, either being on the ball regarding social media or (more likely) tipped off the musicians themselves, sees the video and reaches out to lead singer Dave Carroll. Story works it way onto some mainstream blogs/journalism websites.

July 8: United Airlines speaks with Carroll, and issues a response statement worthy of the best crisis-handling communication consultant:  They apologize, they were wrong, they will fix the situation with this customer, they appreciate the lesson, they will review their policies, they will use the video as a training aide for their workers.  Excerpt:  “..(this video) struck a chord….(it) is excellent, and we plan to use it internally as a unique learning and training opportunity to ensure that all our customers receive better service….This should have been fixed much sooner.”

July 8-9 :  Meanwhile, the blogotweetosphere is just getting started, and news networks such as CNN and FOX pick up the story and fan the flames. Wikipedia article on Sons of Maxwell is updated with an account of this incident. How about a statement from the baggage monkeys’ union?  What is the cost for additional insurance on airline baggage, e.g. a $3500 musical instrument? Did the musicians hold any kind of travelers insurance?   I like United’s response, but if they really wanted to turn lemons into lemonade, they should do co-opt the notoriety of the incident and offer free baggage insurance coverage for guitars – because you know, United loves guitars.  

July 10:  Having crushed this lame corporation and its hapless employees, Dave Carroll issues this oh-so-Canadian, conciliatory statement on YouTube:

“One day I hope to have a good laugh aboot all this with her.”

Bob Taylor also jumps into the video-PR fray, offering some advice for travelling guitarists and of course further promotion of the Taylor Guitars brand.

July 11: Jet-fuelled by all this attention, the viewcount on the video shoots up an order of magnitude, past the one million mark. Other musicians chime in – apparently this cause extends beyond mere guitars and includes all manner of stringed instruments, including mountain dulcimers: 

There is also apparently a musical precedent for all this: Thirty years ago Tom Paxton wrote a song about a very similar incident called Thank You Republic Airlines.

Flying through the Michigan skies
with a song in my innocent heart
I placed myself in professional hands
Masters of the traveler’s art
When I opened my guitar case
etc…

Yeah, well, they didn’t have YouTube thirty years ago. 

Nor did they have $15 bagagge handling surcharge fees.

July 12-15:  After growing like gangbusters, the video seems to be levelling out a bit just under 3 million cumulative views,  with a cruising altitude of several hundred thousand views per day:

THE FUTURE:   Carroll’s promised two sequels to this video will no doubt give it some additional kicks upwards, in the coming weeks.  The story itself will earn Carroll and his band some additional gigs, album sales, as well as tributes in the annals of country musical and business communication case studies.

Customer-facing staff at United Airlines will learn more about showing empathy and concern when a customer complains.  Managers will learn to take seriously threats of muscial/PR retaliation, and allow for exceptions to rules under certain circumstances – in this case, the complaint was issued a week later than the 24 hours allowed by United’s complaint policy.  

Musicians will continue to fly without insuring their equipment.  Pundits will use this example over and over in their discussions about the power of social media, and baggage handlers will defiantly crush all guitar cases they come across.

Same Data, Different Graphs (aka “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”)

Here are two graphs done early this year, regarding U.S. job losses resulting from the current financial recession, as compared to previous recessions.  Both graphs use the same data, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the difference between the graphs is startling.   The first graph was put out by the office of a politician, Nancy Pelosi.  The second graph was put out by a journalist, Fielding Cage, at TIME magazine.

This could have come straight out of a book by Edward Tufte, or any of those various classics about lying with statistics. 

This feat of manipulation was accomplished using three tricks:  

1) Vertical scaling:  Both graphs use a y-axis that is proportionately bigger than the x-axis, but Pelosi’s does so a bit more, thereby exaggerating the downward slope of recent job losses.

2) Absolute values:   Pelosi’s graph counts actual number of jobs lost, instead of the percentage of jobs lost.  The workforce has grown considerably over the years, so once again, this exaggerates the downward slope of recent job losses.

3) Narrower context:  Pelosi’s graph uses fewer past recessions in the comparison, and leaves out the more-severe 1981 recession, as well as two shorter-lived recessions ( 1974 and 1980).   This substantially reduces the nuance in our mental comparison with past recessions, and skews our extrapolation of what might happen going forward with the current recession. 

This would be an insult to our intelligence, if it wasn’t such a perfect example for instructional purposes… a fine example of information design. On a practical/political front: Score three points for cultivating greater hysteria on the one hand, and cynicism about data & public policy on the other hand.

The only thing lamer than this?  This graph : 

  This bit of USA Today-worthy Chart Junk put out by the Republican party (and posted to their website) tracks how many jobs were lost since Democratic Party took control of Congress in 2007… which compares nothing with… well… nothing. It’s like some sort of weird Creationist theory of economic history that picks an arbitrary “Day One” and denies the existence of independent natural forces, forces that can’t be fully controlled by the would-be gods in Washington.  If this were a tongue-in-cheek reprise to Pelosi’s graph, it might be clever, but it’s not… it’s just upping the ante of stupidity.  Memo to both parties:  Get Real.   

Finally, here’s a third graph, with even wider context, put together by economist William Poley:

 

Context and perspective is everything, ain’t it?

(More graphs and analysis on the above can be found on William Poley’s blog.)

Are you in Xinjiang? REALLY??

Somewhere near what the media likes to remind us is the “Ancient Silk Road,” an authoritarian, militarized state clashed with students/protesters/rioters (some or all of the above, depending who you ask) and, while it did so, this state also shut down mobile phone networks and closed/slowed-down access to the Internet, so that it could better monitor/manage/massage the data packets flowing in and out of the region.

No, the state involved here isn’t Iran — although there is a Central Asian / Muslim ethnic component to this conflict — the state this time is China, and their modus operandi seems straight out of the Teheran playbook, right down to the paramilitary enforcer thugs.

Now here’s the added twist: Remember how the BBC got its fingers burned in Iran, with its journalists (and various other British nationals) being thrown in the Persian slammer on “suspicions of inciting unrest?” So, with that obviously not in mind, here is what the BBC posts on its website, after an article on the conflict in Western China:

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Are you in Xinjiang? Did you see what happened in the region? Tell us your experiences using in the form below.

A selection of your comments may be published, displaying your name and location unless you state otherwise in the box below.

The BBC may edit your comments and not all emails will be published. Your comments may be published on any BBC media worldwide.

Name

Your E-mail address

Town & Country

Phone number (optional):

Comments

[SEND BUTTON]

The BBC may edit your comments and not all emails will be published. Your comments may be published on any BBC media worldwide.

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OMG, BBC…  REALLY?!?!  This is a *REALLY* great idea and shows how Journalism-2.0-savvy you are.  Really.  Don’t bother with those pesky encrypted forms… it will only slow down the sockpuppet-spam you’ll be getting from the workers over at the Ministry of Propaganda. Hey, while you’re add it, you can add the following language to your article’s disclaimer, for the few submissions that come from outside the Chinese government:   Please that after you submit this unsecured web-form, everything you write will be reviewed by your government handler and several layers of secret police.  The BBC will be happy to feature your drugged and interrogated face in a future broadcast about the diplomatic hostage stand-off between China and your country of origin, three weeks from now.  Cheerio!

P.S. If you are not a foreign national, but in fact an English-speaking local rebel, well good luck with everything. We really appreciate your help with our coverage of this news, and hope that if and when you get to form your own separate authoritarian state, you’ll give us the sort of press access we’ve come to expect from this region of the Ancient Silk Road.

..and the rockets’ red glare: Some Favorite Fireworks

Dragon’s Eggs…  they’re just like popcorn, only buttered with a magnesium-aluminum alloy…  Tasty!

Whistlers…  or as D.E.S. would call them, Screaming-Slytherin-Quiddich-Players-From-Hello-Without-the-O

Scrambling Comets…  cf. Whistlers

Salute… used for those grande finales, blinding-Titanium-white explosions of earth-shaking, ear-splitting, bowel-moving power

The World’s Biggest Firework Shell… 48 inches of incinerating love… haven’t seen this one personally, but apparently the explosion’s diameter covered half-a-mile… the fact that it was blown up over a city in Japan makes it all the more disturbing

July 2.5 – 3.5 :: Fence-Sitting Beige and Other Considerations of Northern North American Dual Citizen’s Day

Update to last year’s misguided concept of Canadian-American Dual Citizen’s Day, via Facebook:  

Dan is celebrating Northern North American Dual Citizen’s Day

http://danspira.wordpress.com/2008/07/02

Aliza at 8:59pm July 2:
Wouldn’t 11:52:30 tonight until 00:07:30 July 3 be the North American Dual Citizen’s minutes of celebration? That’s equidistant from July 1 and July 4. And, everyone deserves their fifteen minutes

It’d even give you enough time to sing this to the (equally) mangled tunes of both O Canada AND the Star Spangled Banner, wave both flags, and maybe even light a sparkler or two. Of course, you’d have to be careful about colours you wear– red? white? blue? Fence-sitting beige? Or is that concern too Canadian of me? <chuckle>

Ezra at 9:59pm July 2
Are my dual citizens allowed to join in the fun?

Dan at 4:19am July 3  (waking up to the dawn’s early light, apparently)
Aliza — I was *just* thinking that it should be a mid-day 7/2 to mid-day 7/3 celebration… but your 15 minute interval around midnight idea is even better. Just enough time to down a shot of bourbon, a shot of rye, and rattle off those mangled anthems… ah, good times…

Ezra — As long as they (or you) can mash-up their national anthems, then, YES!

(props to SMG for throwing his bowler hat into the fray, with the “Star Mangled Banner of the Queen” )

 This is all so very, very wrong.

Oh… Canada.

Here’s a follow-on to last year’s little video tribute to Canada Day:

Living in the U.S. can be a challenge for Canucks. As a literature professor once explained to me, in the American story, a hero’s rite of passage consists of a road trip across the United States and/or losing his/her virginity.  The Canadian hero, on the other hand, either battles cancer (or has a close relative who does), and/or moves to the United States and bcomes commercially successful.

Hat tip to DRZ for this NYTimes Op-Ed by U.S.-domiciled Canadians,  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/opinion/01canadaday.html?_r=1 , featuring Rick Moranis, Malcolm Gladwell, and others. 

(still remember that old CBC signoff from years ago, growing up… never understood the underwater robot claw dude… guess that was Canadian high tech in the days before the Interwebs…)  

Regulations Gone Bananas

The EU Agriculture Commission has announced that, in light of the dismal economy and high food prices, it proposes to slightly relax its onerous rules and regulations on fruits and vegetables in retail markets.  

Pages and pages of standards and specifications on things like onions and carrots will be tossed out into the compost heap. Or, as some corn-fed headline writers put it,

 EU May Repeal Cumbersome Fruit and Vegetable Marketing Regulations 

 Curvy Cucumbers Boomerang Back to EU Shelves

Brussels Touts New Proposed Laws for Fruits and Veggies

(ok, that last one… I made up)

Also interesting is what they haven’t released from their bureaucratic calipers: Bananas.   Perhaps this a hold-over from the 2001 Banana Wars  (which strangely enough, affected the art poster business)… they don’t grow ‘em, so they can regulate ‘em.  But then, they are keeping most of their rules on apples and oranges too. 

Here is an excerpt from the EU specs on bananas, Commission Regulation (EC) 2257/94:

III. SIZING Sizing is determined by: – the length of the edible pulp of the fruit, expressed in centimetres and measured along the convex face from the blossom end to the base of the peduncle, – the grade, i.e. the measurement, in millimetres, of the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces and the middle, perpendicularly to the longitudinal axis. The reference fruit for measurement of the length and grade is: – the median finger on the outer row of the hand, – the finger next to the cut sectioning the hand, on the outer row of the cluster. The minimum length permitted is 14 cm and the minimum grade permitted is 27 mm. As an exception to the last paragraph, bananas produced in Madeira, the Azores, the Algarve, Crete and Lakonia which are less than 14 cm in length may be marketed in the Community but must be classified in Class II.

..or, as yet another headline writer put it:

Why is this banana legally curved instead of just crooked? Because it is the fruit of the finest judicial minds in Europe

So we’re back full circle to the earlier Quote du Jour by Doug Larson, about Survival Skills in a World of Orderly Standards. Here’s another quote attributed to tbat Doug Larson guy (whoever he is), appropos to the EU Veggie-Madness: “A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself”

Quote du Jour

A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.

- Doug Larson

Thriller

Rest in peace, Michael Jackson. Your global influence was far and wide.

(This video wins several awards, including “Best Use of Philippine Prison Man-Hours” and “Best Use of Those Standard-Issue Bright Orange Jumpsuits”)

 

 

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6/27/09 UPDATE:   The above item was featured on CNN today — http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/06/27/michael.jackson.prisoners.thriller/index.html — which only goes to show, the difference between a blogger who searches the word “Thriller” on YouTube and posts the first thing he sees, versus a paid journalist who does the same thing, is the 36 hours it takes to arrange an overseas telephone interview and check up on some facts. 

Still glad I’m not a journalist.

Bada-Bing, Microsoft Bumps up the Fight Against Click Fraud

What does suing two brothers and their mom in Vancouver for $750k have to do with taking on Google?  

More than you’d think.

As reported in the WSJ,  Microsoft recently “filed a lawsuit against three people that it alleges committed a form of “click fraud” (…)  in which automated computer scripts or large groups of people click on (pay-per-click) online advertisements without having any interest in the services or product being advertised. The company alleges that the defendants engaged in “competitor click fraud,” one form of the ruse in which a perpetrator seeks to exhaust a competitor’s (pay per click) advertising budget while boosting the prospects of their own advertisements.”

The defendants in this case are Eric Lam, his brother Gordon Lam and their mother Melanie Suen, who ran up prices for ads for auto insurance and World of Warcraft Gold.  World of Warcraft (aka WoW) Gold is a virtual currency, that you’ll need if you want to upgrade your Orc’s wimpy little “this-is-your-dad’s-Oldsmobile” battleaxe to a blinged-out Fel Edged Battleaxe.  See, the Lams owned a site called WoWMine.com, and some of their competitors included such notables as wowgold-sale.com, wow-cheapwowgold.com,  wowpowerwow.com and innumerable others. The Lams needed to get a Fel’s edge on the competition, and (allegedly) used click-fraud to peddle more of their virtual metal.  

Woo-hoo Microsoft… making the world safe again, right?

Well, the way I see it, this isn’t just a case of  “Too-Little-But-Not-Too-Late”  in the online scourge that is click fraud.  This is another way that Microsoft tries to establish itself as the “good guys” of online search who “clean things up.”

Click fraud is old news, which makes its continuance all the more appalling.As a former owner of a consumer-facing online retail store, I’ve had more than my share of terse conversations with advertising representatives at Yahoo and Google who were complicit with the abuse of their system by their “publisher” networks and “unique” users. My peers who owned online businesses were all complaining too, but what real short or medium term incentive did those search engine salespeople have to look into an advertiser’s complaint of click fraud? They had an ever-increasing number of people using their services and had quarterly sales targets (and pay bonuses) directly linked to the volume of clicks on their advertiser accounts, so why bother look into a purported scam that is difficult (but not impossible) to track?    The long term incentive (customer trust, service and brand integrity) wasn’t enough to spur action.

Eventually, we negotiated some simple estimated ”store credits” based on unusual click traffic.  This saved Google and Yahoo the hassle of having to investigate the integrity of their networks and gave us a bit of a break, but unfortunately that workaround only dealt with sudden bursts of click fraud.  For ongoing click fraud, particularly from sleazy competitors, it did nothing. In the past few years, I know of at least two lawsuits — against IAC and Google — launched by advertisers who allege that those search engines have not being doing enough to deliver what they promise to their customers — clicks from actual live prospective customers.  Google settled their case for $90 million. I also know of one case where Google went after a click fraudster, but only after he tried to extort them for $100k.  Aside from that, I don’t know of any cases where Google pursued legal action against people simply because they tried to make themselves (and Google) extra money by having advertisements clicked a few (hundred thousand) extra times.

Enter Microsoft and Bing.  Bing is all about making a whole bunch of nit-picky improvements to the search experience, to make it more usable and practical.  Whether or not Microsoft succeeds in getting a serious piece of Google’s pie, they will definitely raise the game in terms of search relevance and user experience. ..and “users” include advertisers, who pay for the experience.This is especially true in the beginning stages of Bing’s existence, where Microsoft has to prove the value of its audience to prospective advertisers.  So, in the spirit of “the best defense is a good offense,”  rather than wait for advertisers to complain that Bing’s system is being gamed, Microsoft has sued some poor enterprising Vancouverites with (allegedly) poor business ethics, who just wanted to make a mint selling some WoW bullion.   

So, this lawsuit is just a little bit of PR/street-cred for Microsoft.   What about Google?  Will it go beyond its passive “we’ll tweak our click-filtering algorithm” approach, and go after the people involved?

Google has something that Microsoft doesn’t: Dominance in online search. With its massive datastores, computational power, ubiquitous toolbars, regional hubs and whatnot, Google is actually in a position to put a serious dent in click fraud, by exposing the sources of it.  In fact, all Google would have to do is publicly post the stuff that its ‘click-filters’ are capturing. If everyone could see where the clicks were coming from, which ads those clicks were attacking — and even which competitor ads were NOT being attacked — there are enough people with an interest to appropriately monitor, analyze and act on this information. The people running the click fraud scams would see it too, but they can see it anyway, by opening their own Adsense accounts, so this would not give them an additional edge in the technological arm’s race. Google could maintain its ostensible image of being a neutral provider of just-the-facts, free the information for the masses, yada yada.  

How about it, Google? As Spidey’s dad famously said, with great power comes great responsibility. We don’t buy the passive, non-adversarial act. “Don’t be evil” is not a moral vision… it’s more like something an unscrupulous Swiss banker would say, trading in all kinds of anonymous gangster gold.

Rare or Well Done?

Rare versus Well Done steak?

It’s like like difference between sinking your teeth into a succulent savory treat, versus gnawing on a piece of cardboard.

IMHO.

 

Yum.

Alternative Word for “Pandemic?”

So, we’ve got a Pluto situation.  We’ve got scientifically defined terminology (”planet,”  “pandemic” ) which *technically* applies to a phenomenon, but for whatever reason, creates a problem with the *general public* and their understanding of that terminology.  

Now, the scientific community tends to be very careful about what it chooses to understand about what certain definitions actually mean and what phenomenon said definitions apply to.

However, the general public’s understanding, however fuzzy, will in most cases, have a much greater practical impact. So much so, that it’s easier for the scientific community to update its definitions, rather than trying to to get the general public to shed their fuzzy, but practical, understanding.

GENERAL PUBLIC’S DEFINITIONS:
Planet - n. – one of the nine things that orbit the sun, as seen on all the classic posters on the walls of our schools
Pandemic - n. -  we’re all gonna die from the plague

Both of those definitions are, of course, not exactly correct.

In the first case, the general public’s understanding came first. The scientific community had to play catch up once it started delving into the solar system’s junkyard, the Kuiper Belt and beyond, and found a big methane snowball named Eris, initially named Xena after the Warrior Princess, who happens to be 27% larger than Pluto.

In the second case, the scientific community created a perfectly clear definition, and the general public understood it fully, together with certain strong historical examples.  Now it turns out that we’ve got a virus — Swine Flu, H1N1, H1B Visa, call it what you want — that technically matches the definition, but is still within the threshold of “bad stuff that circulates around the world, but like ‘Deal or No Deal,’ it will eventually pass” as opposed to the “seal the doors, get me my shotgun and canned tuna, we’re in for a long winter.” 

Here’s a great article on this conundrum of strict-definitions-versus-general-understandings:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=abFpa.MBcrYo

 Some excerpts:

“If you apply the current definition of phase 6 mechanically to the current global epidemiological situation, it’s difficult for (the World Health Organization) not to raise the alert,” said Shigeru Omi… “If you announce that we are at phase 6 without any qualification, it gives a wrong impression that there are any many people dying every day. That’s a challenge.”

(…)WHO was asked by health ministers… last month to consider disease severity among broader pandemic determinants. The word pandemic alone may cause people to panic, disrupting businesses and economies…

(…)

Adding a severity scale will give… leeway to raise the alert again if the new swine flu virus, called H1N1, becomes more deadly or if another threat emerges, said Peter Sandman, a New Jersey risk-communication consultant whose client list includes the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and WHO.

 

Basically, scientists would like to say that we’re in a pandemic, without the panic.   So… maybe we can just call it a pandem? 

By the way, I just love the fact that there is such a thing as a risk-communication consultant. 

Between epidemics, pandemics, outbreaks, waves, upsurges and scourges, we’re running out of words to characterize the exact nature of our current situation.

My suggestion: Let’s create something similar to the “Category 1-5″ system that we use with Hurricanes, to cover the spread of global infectious diseases. As disease monitoring improves, our view of it will parallel that of weather monitoring… and forecasting. Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s take my old idea of mapping people’s colds in real-time (which was adequately tackled by others — the subject of another blog post), and create a system of having people mail-in their kids’ snot-filled handkerchiefs to the local CDC facility for RNA testing. This way, we can get a genome-level tracking of communicable disease. 

So where does all this leave us, in the meantime? 

As far as I’m concerned the  H1N1 influenza virus is currently a Category 2 Pandemic.

..whatever that means.