United Breaks Guitars

For an idea to propagate through social media, the message needs to create an impression on masses, generating the urge for viewers to spread. Together with this, the transmitter of the message needs to aim mass influencers in order to generate word of mouth and gain popularity. Apart from this, the video needs to appeal to the viewer’s emotions, this way the receptor will feel part of the event. On the specific case of “United Breaks Guitar” (UBG), we will analyze the type of message it is conveying, the people who first caused an impression on and the repercussions this video brought.
The message that UBG conveyed “empowered” the viewers with information and an idea that they could all relate to. This idea was the insensitiveness of the airlines. This made the message easy to propagate, as people sympathized and understood the problem.
UBG started by “amplifying their fans”, making the message into a song which could caricaturize the situation making it amusing. This was easily implanted into their musical fans, increasing exponentially, when the “mass influencers” got hold of the video. These were in part, mass media and social networks. As Gladwell call them, Connectors, and Mavens are fundamental in the dispersion of a message. For UBG the both probably contributed in the spreadability of this video. Mass mavens possibly argued and stated their opinions about the airlines while Connectors spread the word throughout their wide range of acquaintance, finding it amusing to share a common cause. For an idea to propagate through social media it need to generate an impression on the masses, reach mass influencers and appeal to emotions. This is achieved, and can be seen on the example of UBG by making people see in a comical way the insensitiveness of the airlines. A video with similar propagation to UBG is “Dove Evolution”,. Even though the topics of these videos differ, they achieve similar spreadability as both point out a negative characteristic of the