3 customer comments you can't ignore

Lauren Friedman
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Social Media Posted on March 07, 2012

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Sometimes, social media is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it gives customers a voice, allows opportunities to spread your brand's message, enables natural word-of-mouth marketing, and drives brand awareness and advocacy. On the other hand, it can be a homeland for customer service issues, complaints, protesters, and overall disgruntled people.

When you're managing an online community, you're thrown into the depths of customer service -- sifting through issues, prioritizing, responding, contacting other departments, solving problems, troubleshooting, and more. In many cases, you are the front line for all customer-facing relations, which means you have to be prepared. Trust me, I know it can be overwhelming.

3 customer comments you can't ignore

The fact is, however, there are some negative comments that absolutely need to be resolved and there are others you shouldn't waste your time on. Here are a few tips to help you prioritize which comments actually need responses and which dissenters in social media you can ignore.

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Nick Stamoulis March 13, 2012 at 1:36 PM

Dealing with angry customers is always tricky. You don't want to add fuel to the fire, but sometimes responding will only make that person more aggressive. You are absolutely right about responding to legitimate concerns/complaints though.

Lauren Friedman March 7, 2012 at 4:23 PM

@Jim, Thanks for the comment! There's a lot of noise out there, so you're right, we all need to prioritize what we put time and effort into.

@Brandi, It certainly depends on the brand when it comes to profanity and extremely negative posts. Some brands let those stay up, some prefer not to. For most, extreme profanity and anything that is blatantly offensive is taken down as these pages are meant to be a safe community for their fans and customers. Curious to hear other perspectives!

@Gary, I love when the community chimes in to defend the brand! That's the ideal situation. Thanks for the comment!

Jim Nichols March 7, 2012 at 3:58 PM

Excellent article. As more and more consumers take to the web to express positive and negative things about brands, it's critical that we learn to triage the relevant from the irrelevant. Your approach is so concise -- I am sure it will be valuable for many brands. Thanks!

Brandi Jackson March 7, 2012 at 3:18 PM

Great article. Just curious - while it's obvious that some of the featured posts are certainly not worth engaging, as you either can't/won't achieve a positive outcome with some people or they'll escalate if you DO respond, is it being suggested that the extremely negative, profanity-laced posts should be left up and not hidden?

Am very curious as to what other admins' policies are. We almost never delete a post unless it's horrifically offensive (or blatantly SPAM), but where do you draw the line? For example, Taco Bell has such a broad demo and a ton of fans, so that post will quickly be pushed down. They may certainly leave it, as hiding or deleting it could incite the original poster further. Other brands may be less inclined to leave it, depending on their demographic (ie - what if your demo is 50+ - that would make me more likely to want to hide it, depending on the severity. Then again, thinking a 50+ demo won't get you that many "raw" posts anyway.)

Just curious as to what others thoughts/policies are on when to hide/delete? Again, I think the threshold will be based on total # of fans and the primary demo of the product.

Gary Bembridge March 7, 2012 at 1:11 PM

Great and very helpful and very clear article.

It is always a tricky balance, and you have outlined some good approaches.

One key thing I have found is also that advocates and people passionate about the brand will often contribute and help to diffuse, or get balance within the discussion.

Within our company we have an escalation process for (as you note early in the article) there is anything that suggests an issue with the product performance, safety etc. It is key this is picked up with and escalated.