Comment policies and businesses

25th
MAR

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership, Online Retail, Social Media

Since I raised the reputational issue it seems to have been flavour of the week all over the place. Mathew Ingram, a senior writer at GigaOm.com, a leading technology blog network in the United States and previously communities editor for the Toronto, got into a major twitter debate about the value, or otherwise, of anonymous comments.

Then econsultancy weighed in with a digest of the article and their top five tips on how to set a policy for comments and in the same week, Lisa Barone wrote an article at Small Biz Trends that unpicked which bad commentary it’s worth responding to, and which should be ignored.

So what does this tell us about the business world – is there a sudden rash of nasty (anonymous or otherwise) commentators out there? Not exactly, but there do seem to be two things going on that underline the relationship between business and social media:

1. Economic stringency seems to be creating a sub-group of consumers who are more active, and pro-active, in giving both good and bad feedback online – these are very social media savvy individuals who are comfortable using a wide range of online communication tools to express their feelings and there appears to be a developing behaviour in this group to buy, consume or experience and then to comment on what was obtained for their money, whether it’s a concert ticket, a coffee or a car service that they’ve purchased.
2. New social media users, usually between forties and their seventies, and being educated about social media by their children or grandchildren: these are consumers who’ve got a strong sense of community and customer service and may have spent years complaining fruitlessly about bad or no customer support. While they may be social media novices, they are experienced complainers, and they are mobilising around the failures of big business in particular, and commenting not just on business but on political and social issues that affect them.

It is these two groups, converging on the ‘comment’ function from very different directions, that are driving the upsurge in user-response and that’s why businesses, everywhere, need to have a policy, because comments may only take a moment to create and send, but they can negatively affect a business for years.

Bookmark It