Most business bloggers come to the social media world with an inherent fear of opening yourself and your company up to comments from whomever might want to make them. Even those of us who have been doing this for a while recognize the challenge of encouraging healthy conversation while propelling the company image forward.
Here are a few useful pointers when preparing to respond to comments, on a blog or elsewhere in the social media world. It’s vital to have a plan for how to manage comments—not just the workflow with respect to approving, reading, responding—but also, the perspective necessary to distance yourself from the sentiment or opinion being expressed.
Don’t Take It Personally
One of the key things that will help you is to forget about getting people to agree with you all the time, but rather, work on maintaining the momentum of the conversation you started, and guide it back to your central point. It’s not important whether everyone agrees with your view, but it is critical to acknowledge and appreciate reader participation, keep the conversation interesting, and to guide the conversation in the desired direction.
Categorize Responses
If you’ve only experienced comments on your local newspaper site or YouTube, you may not have a very good opinion of user generated comments. Contrary to the sometimes low-quality comments you find there, most blogs where the author participates find a higher level of discourse. If you want to build an online community, blogging can help if you have a plan in place to foster participation.
- Good comments are those that propel the momentum of the conversation.
- Bad comments can be weak, spammy, or try to bait the author.
- Ugly comments use profanity or abusive language toward author, readers, or others
By defining comments in this manner, you remove sentiment or agreement from the equation—a comment that agrees with the opinion of the author (and may even be complimentary) could fall under good, bad, or ugly, depending on how it is expressed.
Good blogs stimulate vibrant conversation—they don’t try to control it.
