Another example from last week of socia media being used to harness disparate complaints and dissatisfaction, this time the target was the Toronto Transit Commission(TTC), where a picture of a napping worker went viral, acting as a focal point for issues that customers already had with the company. I find these types of new social media viral complaint to be quite and interesting phenomena; I wonder how they will develop and how companies may shift their strategies to combat and also make use of these new public spaces.

Writers like Clay Shirky have identified the power that social media now gives the ordinary person against the might of big institutions. In his book, Here Comes Everybody, he cites several examples of the use of social media to challenge corporations and seek redress for grievances. Social media has certainly reduced the boundaries to association that people used to have; it is relatively easy now to set up a Facebook group or to use Twitter to gather followers to your cause, and once you have a nucleus of people you can start to crowd source skills that can help your campaign. These campaigns still have a kind of chaotic feel to them, often sparking from one expression of disgust from an individual. Just look at the example cited at the beginning of this post; the customers of TTC already had a simmering anger about fare hikes, but what ignited them was one tweet of a sleeping TTC worker; without this trigger that customer anger would most likely have remained dormant. We all understand the power of imagery, and having the right kind of image can be crucial to the success of these bottom up campaigns. It is fascinating though that the advent of cheap digital image and video capture with social media has placed the ability to influence large numbers of people through images in the hands of the man on the street, whereas it was once the exclusive preserve of the media and government.

Here are a handful of ways I can see this developing:

1. Companies will increasingly move into the social media space. We already see this with Facebook pages, company blogs and viral advertising, but I think companies will increasingly try and tackle campaigns such as the one highlighted above on the social media platforms themselves through identificable company representatives and also customer advocates (paid or otherwised).
2. These types of campaign will become more structured and as people learn what works they will try and replicate what now happens spontaneously by design. Imagine a particularly disgruntled commuter deliberately trying to capture pictures over a period of time of a companies employees, waiting for that perfect image that they know will spark a Twitterstorm.
3. Social media and social networking are a novelty for the mainstream media at the moment, so campaigns like the TTC one often grab media attention that is disproportionate; I think this will slowly decrease, which will make it harder for such campaigning to get traction.
4. Companies trying to create Twitterstorms to ruin the reputation of competitors? Or trying to influence online sentiment about their own brand.
5. Social media used to make firms accountable for the changes they say they are going to make.
6. Social media to provide increasingly better support for campaigning on local issues
7. I am reading a book by Julian Baggini at the moment called Complaint, which is a breezy overview of the history of complaint and an attempted dissection of the types of complaint. Baggini argues that the culture of litigation and entitlement have given complaint a bad name (what is in it for me?). Expect campaigns on social media to have an increasing focus not just on poor customer focus, but on financial redress and we might even get the same firms that take on all those accident cases, pimping their business via social networks.

What developments do you see? Or is this just a fad?