One of my favourite metaphors for the Internet is that it is an amplifier. If you have a great business, going online will amplify that, if your business is bad in some way, going online will amplify that too. But these days your poor service is online whether you like it or not and whether you have a presence here or not.

Astralian banks are the latest to feel the heat. Angry bank customers hit web instead of tellers

Angry bank customers have found a new place to deposit their anger.

They are hitting the worldwide web instead of their bank branch and are venting online about sloppy service and interest rate rises.

A new Nielsen Online study in Australia reveals social networking sites such as Twitter are booming with people publicly expressing their displeasure.

The study measured consumer-generated media, or "buzz", around the big four banks and found online discussion spiked following specific incidents related to banks.

[...] Nielsen Online director of analytics Mark Higginson told AAP the statistics showed people who were getting no satisfaction from traditional methods were going online to seek sympathy, support and a little revenge on the banks.Because so many people were online, it was an easy way for them to ask each other about their banks' performance.

"It's not necessarily that people are going online specifically to talk about it, but it's people who are already online. When the topic comes up, it's like a match to tinder wood," Mr Higginson said.

What the report doesn't mention is that people are much more willing to take action based on their communities of interest (friendship "networks") than they would be on simply seeing a story in the newspaper or on TV. The facts are not in dispute here, what is different with online protests is that people who are individually angry about something are able to discover others, sometimes many others.

This is how grassroots actions get started these days and these tools are available to all of us. How have you made use of them?

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