If we’re transparent and honest, negative comments can become opportunities to improve customer relationships.
If you’re on social media for any length of time, you’re eventually going to offend someone, even if you don’t mean to. It’s bad enough when you accidentally anger someone on a personal account, but when one of your business’s social accounts offends someone, that can be particularly fraught. Online reviews and reputation are hugely important to businesses nowadays, so much so that companies will mention Yelp or other reviews in their advertising, and sometimes even hire reputation management consultants to make sure nothing negative shows up in a search.
Realistically, it’s impossible to have only positive reviews and interactions. Even if a business is local, the internet is global. An ad, a post, or a negative review can go viral and attract the wrong sort of attention. Getting angry messages on your Facebook page or Twitter feed is upsetting. When people attack your business, it feels like they’re attacking you personally. The instinct to reciprocate with more venom, or just delete everything, is perfectly understandable.
But the best way to deal with angry customers or offended strangers is to take a step back from the situation and find some emotional distance. This is where tolerance comes in handy. Remember that the person who posted the negative comment is coming at this from a different place. Maybe he or she has a different cultural background, or even a different vocabulary. The fact that someone was upset by something you posted doesn’t make him a bad person any more than your unintentionally offensive post makes you a bad person.
I once offended someone on Twitter when I was trying to agree with her. This writer complained about people who wrote badly about things they hadn’t experienced personally. I replied something like, “You can’t write well if you don’t understand and aren’t willing to learn.” The writer thought the “you” in my reply was referring to her! She got terribly offended that I’d called her ignorant and a bad writer, and her followers piled on. I eventually explained that I meant “a person who isn’t willing to learn can’t write well.” But it took a lot of patience and tolerance for me to continue the dialogue and see her point of view.
That experience made me more careful about what I write online. I often say “a person” or “one” instead of using the generic “you” now, just to avoid misunderstanding. And that is why it’s not necessarily a bad thing to get negative feedback — we can learn from it. If we’re transparent and honest, negative comments can become opportunities to improve customer relationships.
Top public relations firms recommend this formula for dealing with negative comments and reviews on social media: be polite, show concern, be transparent, and correct the problem (if there is one) without excuses. They also recommend, after acknowledging the issue, taking the conversation private, to email or DM (direct messages). Limiting further dialogue to just you and the original commenter stops the conversation from snowballing and getting too many people involved.
On social media, it can be easy to say the wrong thing or to misread someone’s words without the helpful cues of facial expression and tone of voice. But that shouldn’t stop businesses from using social media to communicate with customers. As long as messages are crafted thoughtfully, with an eye toward engaging people instead of simply provoking, the internet provides a place for rich and rewarding conversations.
