“United Breaks Guitars” is a great story of how one determined man with the right connections can make a large multi-national pay attention using social media. Here’s the short version of the background story from Dave Carrol.

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didnt deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world.

The long version can be viewed here but wait until you’ve watched the videos they’re pretty good.

This first one is fun and edgy. United sat up and paid attention when it broke a million views in about a week.  As I write this post it’s past 5.5 million views and has helped the Sons of Maxwell, Dave Carroll’s become much more of a known quantity.  It would be interesting to find out how many copies of the songs have sold on iTunes.

Here was the second video that was produced. This was done after United contacted Dave Carroll.

Here’s the final video. It’s a lot less edgy and hasn’t received the viral push that the first video received.  So far it has only received 248,000 views and has been up for a little over a week.  Part of the reason the number of views is so much lower is that this video was delayed and took almot 6 weeks to get out which allowed the buzz to die down. Had this video been releases within 2 weeks of the first video it would have millions of views. That’s one thing about viral buzz, it doesn’t last, you need to keep it going.

Enjoy the video: