While it's always useful to look at good examples of social media use and policies, it can actually be more enlightening to look at examples of where the use (or lack of use) of social media has gone disastrously wrong. This final section isn't intended to frighten you or discourage you from using social media – quite the contrary. Good examples of bad use make it much less likely that you’ll make the same mistakes and suffer the same ignominies and will in fact be useful supporting evidence to encourage the ‘powers that be’ not only to use social media platforms, but to use them wisely, supplemented with a good and robust social media policy. There are many examples that I can choose from (although none from the world of library and information science), and I’m sure that you can find plenty of others, but these are just a few of my own favourites.

United Breaks Guitars

This is the title of a song written by a Canadian musician, Dave Carroll, which details his trials and tribulations following the damage to his guitar from poor handling by United Airlines staff. He complained to United Airlines, but unfortunately for them they took no notice of him for nine months, and finally he wrote a protest song that went onto YouTube, United Breaks Guitars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo), followed by two more. The first video gained 150,000 views within the day it was released (6 July 2009) and to date has had over 14 million views. The company's belated apologies and offers of compensation were derided and within four days United Airlines’ stock price fell by 10%, costing their shareholders about US$180 million in value. Dave Carroll went on to write a book about his experiences and is now in demand as a speaker on customer service.

Perhaps the biggest error that the airline made was not to take the complaint seriously, and to hope that it would just go away. The second error that they made was to underestimate the power of social media, which to be fair to them, was still little-known in 2009. However, if they had treated their customer with respect and attempted to sort out the problem quickly and efficiently the song would never have been written in the first place.