Invite colleagues
Do a search in Google or Baidu on negative sentiment or online reputation you will get millions of results outlining ways to get rid of these results or 'bury them'. Companies, meaning the marketers working within them seem overly sensitive about the possibility of negative comments hitting the Internet. Sure, it is a legitimate practice to monitor online sentiment but rather than concern yourself with the hiding this from you managers and customers when you 'discover this', why not take a different perspective.
Is there not the opportunity to engage and develop an awareness within the online communities as a Company that is happy to engage and look at improving product, services or image?
The monitoring of the digital space (using SIP:Enterprise) I am seeing that restaurants achieve a high ratio of online complaints.. followed hotels. I guess when you consider that people are typically connected to their social web by a mobile platform, it is easy to share any poor service or experiences with your 'friends'. Then factor in that this sharing on twitter or weibo is shared with search engines and suddenly you have a visible issue... welcome to online reputation monitoring (ORM).
So what does the restaurant or hotel do? Restaurants, nothing! They typically are not monitoring the Internet for sentiment and thus miss this whole piece of being able to engage with their customers... Hotels, well this is a mixed bag. Shangri-la, Hilton, Hyatt Hotels are doing a good job in the most part as they have become engaged in social media marketing and seem to be employing monitoring technology to gain insights into what is happening. The group of hotels (typically 3 star and below) seem to be at the same stage as the restaurants.. just not plugged into the whole social thing (yet!).
So I find some negative comment.. now what. Please don't consider the 'bury' option just yet. That maybe the result but look also at the opportunity to turn this into a positive or at least a neutral experience. Most people are reasonable, online or offline, and will not trash your brand without just cause. See if they have a legitimate case, do everything you can to work through it, offer an individualized solution, apologize and give them space to 'like' you again. A reasonable person will work with you, and although they may never be your advocate or use your product again, they may recognize that you tried to help.
But also recognize that there are a few people who just like to pick fights and complain (other than your competitors). Some look for attention, some are just chronic complainers, and some enjoy being able to lobe quite terrible complaints (personal and attacking) under the anonymity user guise..... I just look at the pattens showing up in SIP:Enterprise at particular online authors who's posts always appear to be with a negative tone/sentiment. At least, platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn make it harder to post under a fake identity and therefore the posts and comments tend to be more legitimate but forums and blog comments can more easily bring out this type of behavior.
So, when dealing with these negative posters, there isn’t a lot that you can do. You need to realize that some battles aren’t worth fighting, and just move on to someone with a legitimate concern. As they say, “Don’t feed the trolls” and I tell you, we see a lot of tolls online.
Update: From Wikipedia - Please do not feed the trolls." It is sometimes abbreviated as "DNFT" or "DFTT." While many seasoned veterans of online communities consider this advice useless, because in a community of any size, someone will react to the troll's posts, others still consider it to be the only effective method for dealing with trolls. Not fanning the fire will, at the very least, not make the situation worse. If the behavior escalates to abuse or vandalism, it is easy to deal with those things.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trolling
Written on Thursday, 17 March 2011 19:36 by Matt McDougall