How To Manage Negative Posts

It's one of the biggest fears our potential clients (notice, they are not social media clients yet), and a reason that many county and city decision makers, business owners and managers do not take the necessary leap into social media...because someone could write something negative about my business on there! Well, guess what, they very well may be doing it already and you have no control over it and worse yet, don't know that it's out there...lurking...waiting to haunt you.

​Ask yourself this, wouldn't it be better to have the ability to hear from an up-happy customer, be able to respond publicly to them, and finally, make it better? You know your business best so think about this: In the past, what have been some of the complaints about your business? Have you been able to fix them? We are guessing you have. And I am willing to bet that some of those clients  that originally were unhappy about (probably) something silly, and you paid them extra attention, fixed it, and maybe even made it better, are one of your best word-of-mouth (WOM) promoters now. 

​I organized an entrepreneur panel for the Flagler County Chamber of Commerce breakfast last year. One of the audience members asked the question: "How do you avoid someone posting something negative on your page". One of the panel member’s answer was priceless: "Be fabulous at what you do and you don't have to worry about that so much" (props to Kayhan Ekinci at Office Divvy). Yes, if you provide exceptional customer service, it's true that the likelihood of negative comments goes way down. But in reality, we know that you can't please everyone, all the time (some people are clinically off their meds, we understand). So what do you do? ​

1. Respond immediately. If you are a restaurant and it’s a complaint about service, find out who was working and get their side of the story (the truth will be in the middle somewhere). Take the conversation off-line. Provide your phone number and assure the customer that you are committed to ensuring their satisfaction. Be sure to provide a solid solution. IE: I am the manager and will be there at 11am – 9pm and I look forward to taking your call, or please message us your phone number and we will contact you asap – and do it! 
2. Monitor what is being said about you or your business. Set up Google alerts (or something similar), if you are a local business, for goodness sake, read or subscribe to the online version of the newspaper (there's nothing worse than someone saying - did you see that article? You didn’t and it was about you!).
3. ​Do not remove the post. It’s a knee-jerk reaction and we all want to do it. You are mad and you probably want to hide it from all of your other customers that love you. But, sometimes if your customers that love you see it, this can work in your favor. How? Because they LOVE you and will have a hard time believing that you could do any wrong. And our favorites are the ones that are not shy about saying it publically. We had a complaint about the ‘high’ price of a fish sandwich on a restaurant client’s page. We saw it and responded nicely about quality ingredients, etc., etc. Shortly thereafter, several posts following it from some of their fans, in summary, said ‘you get what you pay for and if you don’t like it, go down the street to Burger King and get yourself a .99 fish sandwich. We didn’t say (although we may have been thinking it), it was our customers.
4. You may have to delete and ban a user. If you have tried all of the above, and they are relentlessly posting negative feedback (and maybe even using profanity), and you are confident that even if you offered them a million dollars and a stake in your company, they wouldn’t stop, then delete their post and ban them. That’s right, I said it, get rid of them! We had to do it with someone that, with a little research, found out that he was a serial negative poster about many things, and he was also a professional con-artist (with some pending lawsuits). He was just interested in what he could get for free. And in the end, he got nothing.

​Tell us about your best or worst negative social media post. Did you convert the customer to one of your biggest fans, or did you ban them for eternity?​