3 Steps to Handle Negative Posts About Your Company

Everyone has seen those negative posts about a company. You might be standing in line at your favorite locally owned coffee shop to get your triple shot of mocha coffee grandalicious and scrolling through your Facebook feed and you see it:

Cindy McNegative types: “I cannot BELIEVE how bad I just got treated by the staff at ……” and on it goes.

Your first thought?  “I am SO glad that wasn’t MY company Cindy was talking about in her negative posts.”

But what if it was?  What if one of your new staff members was asked a question he did not know the answer to, stammered a bit, guessed a bit, did not give the right answer, and pissed off a client who woke up this morning on the wrong side of the bed because his dog was barking at the moon most of the night, and when he slid his foot into his $500 leather loafers realized his cat had poo’d into his shoe.

In other words, two people who should not have spent any part of a day together had their paths cross.

And now, you are reading something negative about your company on social media. So what are you going to do about it?

Here is the best thing I can tell you about negative posts: Do not ignore them.

And since you are not going to ignore it, here is the  3-Step Program we use at Yuloff Creative Marketing Solutions to bail out your marketing:

Step 1: Take a deep breath and a step back.  They’re attacking your brand, not YOU. Do not take it personally or you could make it worse.

Step 2: Decide what their motivation was for posting the negative comment. Do they want a reaction? Do they want us to react badly?  Do they want a problem solved?

Step 3: Agree, Disarm, Solve. “We are sorry you had this occur. We can see your point because (tell them why) ….. We would like to resolve this by (SOLVE THE PROBLEM)….”

I know, eating crow when it is not your fault is REALLY hard. I understand. But as your Chief Marketing Officer, I am telling you that you just need to do it.

It’s now normal for Customer Service to be handled on social media, we have to adapt and use it to our brand’s advantage. In fact, there are a lot of companies who have separate Twitter accounts for their customer service departments. You can too.

Do you need some help with setting up your Customer Service Social Media program? Connect with us at www.Facebook.com/YuloffCreative and we will talk about it.