Is Social Media the Place to Lodge a Complaint?

It has happened often that after hours of being put on hold or switched back and forth between rosily-called customer services representatives and their next level higher ups, I ended up with no solution to my complaint but with a skyrocketed blood pressure level and brutally bruised self esteem.

Then I felt such an urge to let known my frustration and misery as the result of being overpowered by the Big Bad Business. Before the dawn of social media, I would have to resort to shouting in a crowded place to disseminate my messages which would surely die down within a few yards of me.

Now with the social medium providing a central and easily accessible forum, people whose voices are as trivial as mine now have an opportunity to have their voices heard, their experience shared, and their anger and frustration based on common cause released as collective and coordinated barrage at the Big Bad Business.

Even a Big Bad Business is surely concerned about their public image being tarnished by cohort of people lodging complaint about them. However, is online gripping going to fix the problem at hand for us?

Probably not.  Quite as often as in brick and mortar market place, an individual customer’s complaint on the online public forum is drowned out by so many other voices shouting at the same time for attention for a myriad of agendas.  It usually takes a person with a lot of patience, tenacity and belligerence and with the luxury of ample time to push his/her cause through on the online world to be able to build up enough followers, commiserators, and fellow plaintiffs in pursuing a specific problem with a Big Bad Business.  Also, someone who stands up to a business by writing negative comments on social media website such as Yelp could end up facing legal problem in the name of defamation lawsuit brought against him by the business.