No matter how good your business, someone is going to bad mouth it online at some point. Whether they’re just a troll, or they have a point, sometimes it’s difficult to know how to respond.

Here we run through your three main options and the pros and cons of each.

Tackling the problem head on

Tackling the problem head on is often seen as the best response to online naysayers. It’s a great way to show that you listen to what your customers are saying, and answering them directly is the best way of clearing your name in a transparent manner. People will respect you for responding to criticism honestly and anyone seeing the thread after the fact will appreciate the way you handled it.

However, it can backfire. If you don’t have a good answer, or handle it badly (e.g. too defensively) then it can make you look worse. Or more likely, you could end up bumping a thread back to the top of the forum, and the SERPs, when it would have slipped quietly away if you’d have left it.

Responding with action

Sometimes you may find that your critics actually have a point. Rather than directly engaging and publicly admitting fault, a good response is to change your business so that the criticism becomes unfounded.

This way, when others who find the comment/forum thread come through to your site, they will simply find it to no longer be true. And you’ve just improved your business to boot.

Monitoring negative feedback is actually a great way to find out how you can adapt and change to better meet your market’s needs. Just remember not to take everything to heart. People are much quicker to complain than to praise.

Take it with a pinch of salt

Other times, it is just trolls. Everyone falls victim to them at some point. The best thing to do here is just to monitor the situation and see how people react.

Trolls are often called out as such, and require no further action on your part. However, it can also balloon into something much bigger than it needs to. It’s important to check in regularly and be prepared to intervene if necessary.

However, don’t take ‘monitor and see’ as your default position. Sometimes even trolls get taken seriously, and any negative feedback will turn off some potential customers. If the thread just won’t go away, it’s time to wade in and take direct action.

If you liked this article, you may also want to read: top 10 tips for online reputation management

Image Credit: mdanys

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Online Reputation Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.