I’m starting a new series, called Social Media Frequently Asked Questions. It’s a collection of the top asked questions I hear over and over. I’m putting them here on my blog is a great place to help everyone quickly get educated, convince their boss, or be able to help their clients get over these hurdles, pass them around.
Social Media FAQ #1: What do I do if they leave negative comments on my site/blog/forum?
First, understand the fear of most marketing and corp comm teams, they want to show the company in it’s best light, having a mar on it’s brand is a nasty blemish that don’t want to see, in the past, a counter press release or sweeping the issue under the carpet was an option, but no more with the rise of social media. So how can you help these folks?
Well the truth of the matter is, they are going to leave negative comments about your company elsewhere on the web, there’s no way you’ll ever be able to stop this. If you delete or remove the comments from your own corporate websites, it will probably escalate in a ‘louder’ location in blogs and other forums, so don’t do that. The savvy strategist will realize that by bringing the problems and issues closer to home, you’ll actually have a few advantages:
1) You’re in the know. Being on home court gives you the ability to quickly find out issues, so why wait for them to bubble up elsewhere on the web, consider this a ‘free alerting system’ –embrace!
2) Involve them. Detractors come in many different flavors, but in most cases, these are individuals that want you to improve your product, so embrace them, acknowledge them, and get them involved in providing solutions. More often than not, after they see the effort you’ve got to help them, they could become and advocate and sing your praises.
3) An opportunity: By acknowledging and fixing these problems in public, you demonstrate confidence, openness to customer insight, and can turn this into a very positive experience.
I’ve got tons of other answers, but I’d like to hear from you all, how do you respond to this frequently asked question? Great comments will be added to this list, and I’ll credit and link to you.
Hey Jeremiah – nice post, as usual! I think about this a lot, especially as I try to help clients understand when, where, and how to blog effectively. Negative (and sometimes just plain offensive, even if not obscene) comments can be tiring, both for the blogger, and for the readers. I sometimes feel depressed when commenters choose to tear down a conversation, rather than contribute to it.
I encourage allowing all opinions and moderating for spam and obscenity, and also responding to negative comments in a positive and productive way. It is, after all, a publicly observed conversation.
I encourage communities, moderators, authors and commentors to keep relevance and authenticity as their main focus, and as I work with people considering a comment-able medium, I try to help them evaluate how ready their company or organization is to see the entire spectrum of what people have to say.
Jeremiah,
Like several have pointed out, it does depend on the nature of the negative press (sorting out the response from someone in a terrible mood that’s simply lashing out vs someone genuinely upset about your service).
We’ll never lose the former, but the latter is key. If this customer took the time, even 2 minutes, to leave a comment, the response that you give can make or break that customer relationship. NOT responding will break the relationship, hands down.
But it’s not like every complaint warrants giving something away (free shipping, free goods, coupons for future purchases, etc.) In all likelihood, I’d be willing to bet that these people will be more impressed by your response that you’re listening and, depending on the nature of your response, willing to spend a few minutes and engage directly with them, the issue they had will vanish from their minds but the fact that you responded will help keep them coming back for more.
I recently went to a community site after getting an email that they launched a new feature. I checked it out and wasn’t impressed, so I left a few comments in their feedback form about what they could do to kick it up a notch (imagining that this feedback would simply end up in the electronic slush pile). Imagine my surprise when I got a personal response from their community manager the next day, including 3 different ways to contact him. They didn’t commit to actioning any of my suggestions, but you could sense the sincerity in his response that these would go off to the product team directly and hopefully some could be actioned at some point in the future. The fact that their new service is immaterial. The fact that they responded openly and honestly, AND in a timely fashion, made me a customer for life.
In short, 90% of these cases are great opportunities to solidify relationships with disenfranchised customers, and if you play your cards right, you’ll turn them into an evangelist that will help grow your customer base in the future.
Keep those thoughts coming!
Best regards,
Seth
barring outright trolling or racist comments, you have to let the bad stay up. adds perspective to the topic and in an e-commerce worls tells a buyer that actual people have bought this, not a fluff writer.
Hi!
I’m learning a lot from you all!, Thank you. I would like to ask you all something, maybe it could be the second FAQ associated to the first one:
How do you manage the situation when someone posts a recommendation for your competitor’s product in your forum?. Are you going to leave the brand of your competitor published there?. I mean, that would help people to find my competitors more easily. And what if my competitor is actually better than me in some aspects (this happens often)?. Of course, I can respond highlighting the good things of my product, but readers will appreciate more that opinion that led them to find out a better product than mine.
How do you handle this problem?
Hey! And don’t say “make your product better!”, because, usually, the person in charge of the online marketing is not responsible for the quality of the product, we manage different objectives.
Thanks in advance!!!
Richard.
Negative posts are a response to a bad experience,dealing with large corporations as most already said that like to sweep things under the corporate rug.Instead of facing problems head on and resolving the issue. Usually the person with the problem is likely to settle for a lot less than you think. Some times just justifying their complaint is enough. Most problems that occur are due to a lack of training and monitoring to ensure polies and procedures are in place.A complaint comes through corporate and administrative staff start to close rank or scream I am the boss and nothing is solved. If staff receive training and then monitoring and are praide or receive some type of positive reinforcement for a job well done….ther will probalby be less mistakes.
Seems to me that context is everything here. If it is a public open community, one set of principles apply…if on the other hand it is a corporate or private community, quite another set.
With one of my corporate clients, the “rules of engagement” were simple:
1) Post professionally, speak like you would at work.
2) Disagree with the message, not the messenger.
3) Remember the community thrives on mutual respect.
With those simple guidelines, we managed well over 800,000 messages with almost no editing or censoring by management.
Mark
The good resource should be brought in bookmarks
This is great! Thanks so much for sharing. I really enjoyed reading through your blog!
and finally, i feel that everybody will think that NO body will reply the comment that i leave here..and maybe nobody care the
comment i leaved .this is not a personal blog ,and it's a public place.it's too serious to discussion some thing like “how do
you feel this project?”
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