When To Move On From Engaging in Negative Comments

I used to work for a guy. This guy has gotten a really bad rap over the years. Like, really bad. Multiple forums and third party sites were dedicated to saying negative things about this person. It was so bad, that people were even making Twitter accounts specifically just to bash him and his company.

So he hired a team of social media specialists, myself included, to push down all the negative things about him on the web.

Well, obviously there’s no way to really push down all the negative activity on the web. We could, however, create a strategy in which we could show all the fun and good things that he’s doing now in order to show that he’s really not such a bad guy.

In truth, he wasn’t a bad guy. He just had a lot of really disgruntled individuals after him because of a bad deal he made with a third party company to run a particular section of his business.

But anyway, the point is, we had quite the job ahead of us!

After a while of creating a positive image within his social media channels, we decided it was time to move on towards the third party websites & forums in the hopes of encouraging people to chat with us personally about their issues instead of slandering us on a third party website.

I said exactly this:

“I’m sorry for this misfortune. We would love to speak with you personally about your issue and hopefully get it resolved for you as quickly as possible.”

I did not hide behind a fake name. I also gave direct numbers & emails in which they could contact me.

In most cases, they were happy to get in touch with me, but in a lot of cases, people just wanted to make the situation worse by creating even more lies. One person even tried to say that I was no longer an employee of the company. What the what?! Why would I be trying so hard to help resolve an issue for a company that I don’t even work for?

After a while, there came a point where I had to stop engaging with them. It only took a couple times of going back and forth when I realized that I wouldn’t get through to them no matter what I said.

So at that point I said:

“I’m sorry you feel that way. You have my direct email & cell for when you’re ready to talk.”

And that was it. I had to ignore the rest of the conversation. Did it infuriate me? Frick yeah it did! I was so irritated that these people would rather moan about how awful my boss was instead of trying to actually resolve the issue.

You will always come across people who would rather moan and complain instead of solve the issue.

Here’s what you should do depending on the platform:

Twitter:
Block & report spam. No matter how many times they try to activate a new Twitter account to get at you, just block & report spam. Who cares if they have a Twitter account that does nothing but bash you? They may have a total of 15 followers…MAYBE. And who’s to say that those 15 people are even paying attention? Just block & spam.

Facebook:
If you can’t resolve the issue, then block them. Once blocked on Facebook, all the comments that that person made disappears so your reply comments to try to resolve the issue will look silly. So go ahead and delete your comments too. Everyone will forget about it in no time – no reason to ever talk about it again.

Third party sites:
As stated above, try your best to get them to talk to you directly about the issue. If after a couple communications they don’t seem interested in communicating with you, then leave it alone. There’s no reason to keep fighting over something that you’re going to lose against. They do not want to resolve the issue, so walk away.

Your own blog:
Try to reason with the individual and if it gets too out of control or the issue just isn’t resolving, there comes a time when you need to just delete the comments and spam/block him from ever returning. Most of the time you’ll be able to resolve issues on your own blog, but there are times when you just can’t.

The point is…

There are exceptions to the rules and there are people who simply don’t want to kiss and make up. When in those situations, the best option is to walk away tall, knowing you did everything in your power to fix the situation.

How bout you?…
Have you ever come across an irate person who just didn’t want to solve the problem?