Lighthouse Web Dezines, LLC

One of the services that I offer to clients is to keep up with their social media outlets. When one of my clients had a negative feedback on Facebook I sent the comment to them and asked for a response. I was told to delete it if possible. I was a little taken back by the response that I got; obviously this customer took the time to post their suggestion to the company in the hopes of change. To simply delete it could be seen as saying that the client isn’t important and we really don’t care what you think and you opinion does not matter.

Many rules have changed in the way that we are expected to deal with clients, customers and their feedback. Deleting the feedback is an option but there are consequences to these actions that you must be able to accept.
In the above example we could have said, “We are going through numerous changes and expected kinks in the plan along the way. We appreciate your feedback as it helps us improve our service to our customers. We hope you give us another chance to make it right.”

Would she come back? Maybe, what if she did, loved the service that she received and came back and offered a rebuttal her original comment. That would be pretty powerful.

Negative comments can be hard to stomach especially when they attack your brand, or service practices. A negative comment or two are not going to kill your image and can be a great way to prove yourself.

Here are a few tips for how to handle negative comments on your blog or social media page.

• Don’t delete – As tempting as it may be don’t automatically delete every negative comment. Your visitors will sense that you are censoring comments and they will resent it.
• Respond to Comments – Take the time to respond promptly to comments left about your brand. People will have more respect for you and your business for not shoving it under the rug or dodging the comments all together. There are many online tools that allow you to keep track of your brand online and in social media.
• Google Alerts allows you to set search criteria and it will alert you whenever that condition is met. So if you want it to monitor your name, or your competitor, or a product name Google Alerts will notify you when that is mentioned in blogs, the web or on the social media networks.
• Backtype allows you to search terms and phrases to see what people are saying about it.
• Be Honest, don’t make promises you can’t keep and don’t say something that you are unsure about. This can damage your creditability and your reputation.
• Be Humble and consider if you can use the comments and suggestions that people are saying to improve your service and your brand.
• Moderate your comments, while you don’t want to delete everything you will want to delete harassing comments that are non-productive. You don’t have to allow people to run rampant on your site. Often times when people do this it will ruin their creditability and people generally ignore them anyway.

Whether you are a one man operation or part of a huge organization, having a firm idea of how you are going to handle positive and negative feedback is a good first step.