Spreading Negativity
Content these days is becoming increasingly portable. Services like Add This are helping content spread to just about every place imaginable. At the same time content aggregators are popping up everywhere. Conversations are chunking themselves into smaller conversations, some say Snack Size conversations, and are becoming difficult for the content source to act as the hub of the conversation. Many people will read about something on a blog or a website and then take that conversation into another network and thats were the real commentary occurs. Bloggers (most are content generators) are being abducted by content aggregators and some of them are unsure of what to do or how to track and monitor these conversations. Despite the limitations of Social Media Monitoring, the distributed web is increasingly setting off alarm bells with brands that find out that they have had some negative comments deep inside a group on an obscure social network. It reminds me of the good old days (4 years ago) when clients would freak out because of a blog comment that was negative. What are we going to do? People are saying bad things about the brand. What can we do to stop the negativity? The answer was and always will be. Enter into the conversation as much as possible and open up your brand to ensure that people can provide you feedback directly. Make sure your messaging is transparent -and- do all that you can to increase the level of positive truthful brand messages inside these networks. You should never ignore constructive comments. There will always be haters out there -but- if the percentage of haters is less than 1% of all of the messages out there, then people will understand. How many times have you seen one bad review on Amazon because that one person thought that she ordered a different product and didn’t get what she really wanted -and- so that bad rating. Also don’t forget about the Whole Foods CEO who was purposfully writing bad press on Yahoo! Finance to bring down his rival Wild Oats - some of the bad comments out there are from rivals who want to chip away at your market share. The last point is that maybe the negative comments out there are justified and true -and- if that is the case than it is time to rethink you business practices and make better products!