Mediaboss Marketing

29 March 2012 Last updated at 20:22 ET By Fiona Graham Technology of business reporter, BBC News

When movie rental service Netflix took the decision to split the company, forcing customers to sign up to two accounts if they wanted to both watch movies online and rent physical DVDs, it may have expected that some of its users would be a little ticked off.

What it hadn't anticipated was that those users would take to social networks like Twitter and Facebook in their thousands to complain about the move - forcing the company into a massive U-turn.

In a possibly more predictable faux pas, fast-food giant McDonald's launched a social media marketing campaign where it encouraged users to tweet happy tales about dining with the company.

Unfortunately, the #McDStories tag ended up being used to express many people's less than positive thoughts about the home of the Big Mac.

Tales of big business coming a cropper in the brave new world of social networking are becoming commonplace.

But if you're a small or medium sized business, do you need to worry about what your customers are saying about you online?

For Alex Bard of Desk.com, the customer support tool launched recently by customer relationship management specialists Salesforce.com, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

"The conversations are happening already. It's not in the control of small or even big business," he says.

Mr Bard quotes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: "If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they each tell 6,000 friends."

Excerpt from:
Keep the social media cowboys at bay