Social networking can seem a daunting proposition to SMEs – as can staying out of the clutches of cowboy ‘social media experts’

When movie rental service Netflix took the decision to split the company, forcing customers to sign up to two accounts if they wanted to both watch movies online and rent physical DVDs, it may have expected that some of its users would be a little ticked off.

What it hadn’t anticipated was that those users would take to social networks like Twitter and Facebook in their thousands to complain about the move – forcing the company into a massive U-turn.

In a possibly more predictable faux pas, fast-food giant McDonald’s launched a social media marketing campaign where it encouraged users to tweet happy tales about dining with …