Companies that hide behind anonymous and unhelpful web pages – trading customer support telephone lines for interactive FAQs - are finally being hoist by their own petard. The very medium on which they depend for so called service delivery – the Internet - is now being used by disgruntled customers to berate them for their inadequate service. I refer of course to the use of social media: Facebook, YouTube and blogs such as this – all which provide a decidedly public forum for anyone with a laptop, and an axe to grind. Most alarming: in delivering their damning indictments, the critics are, often, achieving higher natural search rankings – for companies’ target search terms - than the businesses themselves. Take for example, United Airlines, for whom the top-ranked site untied.com – a scathing critique of the company’s baggage handling procedures and service – is a perennial thorn in the firm’s cyber-side. And, for United, it gets worse. Who could forget musician and disgruntled United customer Dave Carroll’s YouTube video, ‘United breaks guitars’, which has, to date, attracted almost 10m hits. (For those that haven’t seen it, the video recounts how - having watched United baggage handlers toss, and summarily break, his expensive custom guitar - Caroll received neither compensation nor apology.) Others who have suffered at the hands of YouTube, Twitter et al include household name firms such as Taco Bell, Apple, HP, and British Gas. Of course, there’s no denying that, by its very nature, the web provides a medium for malcontents and out and out lunatics too; witness the obscenity that was the Raoul Moat Facebook group. But, sanity usually prevails: If a company is being unduly impugned, it has a right and means of reply. And, experience shows, unfair criticism is very quickly...

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