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At Marketing Profs , CB Whittemore interviews Guy Winch , author of The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships, and Enhance Self-Esteem . Winch, a psychologist, offers up advice on how to deal with complaining customers. The trick is to make the complainers contribute to the business, and not simply to ignore them. In order to do that, Winch argues for making the complaint process more constructive, and reminding all employees of the value of criticism: Businesses should educate employees down the ranks—especially frontline employees—about the value that customer complaints provide to companies. First, complaints are a crucial source of information about potential problems with products, services, or procedures that might be causing customer attrition in addition to customer dissatisfaction. Second, they provide companies an opportunity to perform service recoveries and engage customers in a dialogue while doing so. Companies that truly listen to their customers' complaints will gain valuable insights about customer needs and wishes. Companies can then apply those insights to improve the customer experience. Read How an Unhappy Customer Can (Paradoxically) Help Your Business here .

The growth of the social media tool Twitter has been one of the leading tech and media stories of the last year. But skeptics abound as the business model for Twtter seems elusive, secret, or nonexistent. As Twitter's founders play their cards close to the vest, some businesses have found a great deal of utility in the tool. Small Business Trends writers have frequently highlighted the potential value of Twitter to small business owners--most recently giving it a key mention in their list of 16 Things You Can Do Yourself to Create Word-of-Mouth for Your Business . Zane Safrit writes: Join the millions of people who’ve looked like fools at least once in their life. It’s a party. And join them as they connect with millions of customers, prospects, partners, vendors, ideas, innovators solutions. And the New York Times is getting in the act. In today's paper, Claire Cain Miller profiles some small business owners who drank the Twitter Kool-Aid and are seeing big results after relatively little effort: “We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s , but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling , an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses. Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network. Read Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media here .