Gone are the days of Leave it To Beaver. Gone are the days of business ignoring the complaints of their paying customers. Woe be to those businesses who decide that “customer 547819 will get over it… we’re too busy to deal with that silly complaint. ”

Meet Halifax Msuician, Dave Carroll. He took a united airlines flight and checked his guitar. Baggage handlers were scene tossing the luggage and said guitar onto the trolley. Breakables? What’s breakable?

Fast forward one year. Dave Carroll is still trying to get United to compensate him for their careless baggage olympians. He is frustrated and probably quite pissed off. So what did he do? He took to Youtube and sang his little heart out over United Breaking Guitars.

What happened? 600,000 views later and Dave Carroll is among main stream media telling his story. He has been flooded with support emails… friend requests and has been inundated with requests to appear/perform from Vegas to Oprah. You can bet United is now all ears and now all ready to help right their wrong… hell, it’s only been a year… not bad for big corporate business – non?

Interesting. This has resulted in Dave Carroll not only getting United’s attention… but he has received a number of requests from guitar shops to fix his guitar for him out of sympathy… awareness across north america of his musical talents and of course… another great case study for the SM books.

See Dave’s full story here:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/songwriter-overwhelmed-with-success-of-united-breaks-guitars/article1213060/

Pop quiz hot shot! You are in front of an audience delivering your presentation when you click on a youtube clip and the interrupted buffering begins making you sweaty in the pits and the rest of ‘em huffing and puffing. What do you do?

You make sure you go to tooble.tv - download your clip and play smoothly anytime anywhere sans internet. <they convert your video to an mp4>

Yeah! I know… it’s pretty cool!

I love brilliant minds – looovvve them! Meet Bernard Lachance. Cuty, smartypants and musically talented too! Mr. Lachance has leveraged some basic social media tools to get the attention of one Oprah Winfrey! That’s right! The big O herself!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tohGOH20aGA]

And if blogging about him wasn’t enough… I decided why don’t I just knock on Oprah’s door and let her know that a fellow Canadian would like to make her acquaintance. So I did. See note below. Watch this space. HAH!

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Hello Oprah!

I am a marketing & advertising professional. I stalk emerging media, market trends, social media, consumer behavior and in my travels, more often than not, I come across brilliance!

So… I am sending you a note on behalf of someone I have never met but have uber respect for… his name is Bernard Lachance… and he is trying to reach you with a message using some basic Social Media tools. I felt compelled to not only blog about him <www.TheRenaissanceEffect.com> but to reach out to you directly to let you know he’s someone you may want to meet preferably before May 2009.

You can view his invitation for you and the lovely Gayle here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tohGOH20aGA

Thanks for being amazing at life.