I personally reached out to the mother, checked the flight records and reached out to United before sharing anything. We also waited until the child was home safely before sharing anything.
Re: the question on scaling. Our system is built to allows companies to simply respond to complaints we automatically share with them via Twitter. We then send the company's response back to the user receive that response via SMS so the conversation can be continued without our involvement, although we retain the conversation data privately on our site. This removes us from the typical dialog we see on the majority of complaints. I only personally get involved when we see something of an emergent nature.
From a business perspective can you scale that approach? I would imagine it takes a fair amount of effort and time on your part. Are you planning to get community involvement in the vetting process?
