As I was tweeting about a very bad customer service experience at dinner on Saturday night, it struck me that customer service is even more important than ever in this era of social media and mobile technology.

With the growing popularity of smartphones combined with the massive increase in the use of social media (twitter, facebook etc), businesses really need to make sure they are up to scratch, otherwise they could see themselves splashed on the first page of a Google search for all the wrong reasons.

Recently released research from Nielsen shows that over 43% of online Australians now own a Smartphone (such as an iPhone or a Blackberry) and that mobile social networking has increased significantly in the last 12 months.  Nielsen’s report found that 26% of social networkers participated in mobile social networking in the past year. Facebook is the most popular social networking site accessed via a mobile (92% of mobile social networkers have visited Facebook), followed by YouTube and Twitter (18%).

However, more than half of Twitter’s mobile users visited the site daily, and 36% of Facebook mobiles users visit its site daily. And this doesn’t include the use of third party sites such as Twitterberry or Tweetdeck or any of the others available for mobile devices.

So as a business owner, think about what this means in terms of getting immediate feedback. While it’s great when you provide excellent service, think of the potential damage to your brand if your customers tweet about what they really think when you fail. Particularly if the person tweeting has a lot of followers.

When do you tweet about a good – or bad – experience?

So far my two networking posts have been about going out to networking functions. While I LOVE networking face to face, and meeting new people, I find that these days I tend to do even more networking from my desk. How you ask? Well mostly via Twitter and LinkedIn.

The basic principles are the same – you connect with people, build a relationship, share ideas, thoughts, referrals and maybe one day do business together.

What I love about using Twitter and LinkedIn for networking is:

• it’s not restricted to my desk – I can network anywhere – as long as I have my laptop or blackberry
• I don’t need to make myself look “presentable” – you know, hair, makeup, clean and ironed clothes – I can network in my PJs. Or my stinky gym clothes. And I often do
• I can share things with people that are harder to share face to face – such as links to my blog, photos, links to interesting articles
• it doesn’t cost anything except a bit of time (I especially love not getting stuck in traffic!)
• it’s easier to find out more information about people, and more quickly, then a 5 minute chat at a networking function can offer - just think of all that extra info on LinkedIn and Twitter – reams of information about their personality, other followers and connections (which can say a lot about a person), and of course business and personal interests.

So how much do you network from your desk? And what do you love most about it?