What happens when you mess with the son of a marketing vet and self-described “industry disruptor”? For Boeing, it’s a social media backlash that continues to bring bad press critical of the company’s tin ear response to an eight-year-old with a fancy for sketching airplanes. The whole flap could be written off as Boeing messing with the wrong person. (The person in question is John Winsor, CEO of the ad agency Victors and Spoils). But make no mistake, it has effectively jump-started Boeing’s social media marketing department.

According to the New York Times, Winsor’s son sent Boeing a cute letter with a crayon-drawn picture of a plane, a design he thought Boeing would be wise to build.  And Boeing’s response? A dry business-like letter came back to little Harry Winsor saying they don’t accept independent plane designs. End of story.

Not surprisingly, Winsor’s dad started blogging about it and a private correspondence became, well, now, a global tale of an uncaring conglomerate and a little boy who loves planes.

In response, Boeing set up a Twitter account specifically to apologize to those offended, saying “We’re expert at airplanes but novices in social media. We’re learning as we go.”

And the public’s response to Boeing’s mea culpa? Cheers, in the beginning at least. The NYT captured one tweet that read:

“I think they are hearing that people have a fond love for Boeing and they need to interact with people a bit more to continue to build that love!”

The Boeing Twitter page has already jumped to 3,290 followers in the past week; a fraction, to be sure, of the Boeing Facebook page with already 17,862 Likes and a steady stream of daily wall posts by its fans.

Still, it’s clear Boeing is not taking an active roll in maintaining or using the site in its favor. For example, they don’t have a Youtube channel despite there being over 100,000 fan-made videos about Boeing airplanes on Youtube (28 of them with over 1 million views!). One Boeing Youtube video raked up 9.48 million views alone.

And what of little Harry Winsor? The story is being held up as an example of how a little boy managed to humanize one of the biggest companies in the world. And Harry’s dad is getting plenty of publicity too.

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