Social media marketers (all 100 million of them, if my Twitter count is correct) are bending over backward to congratulate themselves on the effect the 4M YouTube views of a song about a broken guitar had on United Airlines.   Some social media PR types are touting the enormous brand damage done by the incident, and a journalist at the UK Times Online has even connected a 10% drop in United’s stock price with the spread of the YouTube video.

This reminds me of a similar case of social media overreach in which Vanno was directly involved.  Remember the now infamous Michael Phelps bong incident?   Not long after Lou Dobbs highlighted how Kellogg’s Vanno rank (a social media measure of  company reputation) dropped precipitously after the bong incident, someone connected a drop in Kellogg’s stock price with the social media buzz/outrage around Kellogg’s decision to drop Phelps.

But as we point out regularly, correlation is not causation.  A quick look at what else was happening in the stock market at the time made it clear that Kellogg’s stock price was in fact not being driven down by social media savvy stoners outraged at Kellogg management for dropping Phelps.  Nor was Kellogg - despite Bill Maher’s suggestion - missing a great opportunity to enhance its snack food brand image with the online NORML crowd.

So let’s put the United 10% stock price claim to bed first.   If you look at other airline stocks on July 10 (the low point immediately after the YouTube guitar video release) you’ll see price drops for Delta, American, Continental and even Southwest.  All the drops occurred on small trading volumes, and were followed by a quick recovery.   Moreover, United’s stock (UAUA) had fallen by over 100% in the previous month, and day-to-day variations of 25% or more were common.  It is, after all, a very low-priced stock in a brutal industry during volatile financial times.  In fact, the average day-to-day variance in UAUA price is more than 10% in the period shown in the graph above!

And that thing about hurting United’s brand image?  How do you further damage something that has already hit rock bottom?   At Vanno, United ranks last – 27 out of 27 – in customer satisfaction for the airlines we track, and that was BEFORE the guitar incident.  That puts them below not only American, Delta and Continental, but companies with a self-professed distain for customer service like Spirit and RyanAir.  We’ve also analyzed all the Digg stories over the last few years related to customer satisfaction for the major US airlines, and United ranks near the bottom there.    And have a look at the 400 stories that users submitted in response to the 10% stock drop story on the Huffington Post, The vast majority of those commenters simply chimed in with their own United horror stories. 

It’s not like the guitar story somehow broke a pattern of behavior on the part of United, or the 4M YouTube views changed the direction of customer perceptions.   United may have made a belated attempt to assuage the offended customer/musician, but I seriously doubt very many executive cycles or board moments were dedicated to the incident – despite all the social media navel-gazing.  

So when the next marketer tries to sign you up for consulting services based on the fundamental role social media plays in brand creation and destruction, push back a little.   Chances are they were saying the same thing about Twitter and world politics before someone with a penchant for sequined gloves pushed that attention dial from sublime to ridiculous.