Dave Carroll claimed that United Airlines broke his $3,500 guitar on a flight from Nova Scotia to Nebraska last year. His phone call and e-mail complaints over the next several months didn’t earn Carroll so much as a travel voucher.

So Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell, recorded a song about their misfortune called “United Breaks Guitars” and posted a video on YouTube, with a goal to achieve a million Web hits.

Upon seeing the video, United immediately contacted Carroll to make it right. Since being posted on July 6, the YouTube video has already had more than a quarter million views in only three days. The video earned a 5 star rating with more than 7,000 ratings and nearly 3,000 comments.

We used Social Radar to analyze web chatter on United over the last week. The trend chart below shows a dramatic spike in overall chatter in the days following the video post.

We also analyzed topics of discussion around United Airlines, and nearly every topic of conversation in the past few days has centered around Carroll and his broken guitar.

By ignoring Carroll’s e-mails and phone calls but responding to his YouTube video, is United encouraging customers to use social media outlets to complain publicly?