Social media is all the buzz at the moment – everybody wants to do it, even the bad debt credit companies and oil companies. Indeed, we are very keen to stress to our clients just how important good social media engagement can be. What gets less consideration amongst the excitement is how social media can actually work against you. Big time.

When I was growing up as a teenager in the 90′s, we were going through the custom built computer phase, and shops building cheap PC’s were all the rage. I remember too well one particular shop in my village back then, which became immensely popular. To start with, the surge in popularity led to lots of new customers and before long queues were out of the door of the (relatively small) shop. The ever so slight flaw in their promising business plan was that they couldn’t actually build computers very well, or at least, didn’t have the time to do so. Before long, there were two queues out of the door, with of them being for people taking machines back that didn’t work. The business doesn’t exist anymore, having lasted all of around 6 months.

The big mistake of this former business wasn’t just that their product delivery was poor, or that they were growing too fast to cope, but that their most disgruntled customers were mixing with new prospects. The small shop with two queues just a metre from each other was a perfect environment for conversation between the two customer groups. The memory of the positive radio ads were quickly erased from the minds of possible new customers, replaced instead with the fear of getting their children a computer that didn’t work for Christmas.

Most businesses, especially those with customer satisfaction issues, understand the importance of keeping a safe distance between new and existing customers, and (sadly perhaps) do quite a good job of keeping them at arm’s length. What many of these businesses don’t realise however is how social media is turning this on its head – if you want to build serious engagement with your customers using social media, you simply can’t afford to have disgruntled customers. If you do have customers milling about with unresolved complaints, you can bet they’ll find their way to your Facebook fan page before long.

Only last week when I was idly browsing Facebook on my mobile during a commute, I saw a status update from a friend – the update suggested that by liking the Boohoo fan page, that she had received 15% off her next order. I’ve used Boohoo a couple of times before when buying presents for my girlfriend, so I naturally clicked with interest to their Facebook fan page.

However, what I saw was not encouraging – page after page of complaints:

Now, one slight caveat is that the page I pasted comments isn’t actually the official Boohoo page, but it does have over 5000 likes, and is being actively shared by users thinking that it IS their actual page. When I found their actual official page, it was better but still suffered from the same kind of problems:

Now, I’m not trying to have a go at Boohoo with this blog post – they’ve obviously had some issues with delivery partners recently and I’m sure they’ll get over this in time, but there’s no doubt that these pages are hurting them. Several people commented that they were put off ordering from them on the basis of what they had seen and it’s exactly how I felt.

The reality for brands using Facebook to reach out to their customers is that they need to be red hot at preventing and managing complaints before they spread to their Facebook page. Failing to do this, is pretty much like giving your most unhappy customers space on your billboards to tell people what they think of you.