Dealing With Negative Comments

Hi everyone!

This is my second blog post for my internship so far.

This week I was posed with a real challenge! In my previous post I mentioned that I will be shouldering some of the responsibility for the monitoring and content production for my businesses social media platforms.

Things were going well until I was faced with a  social media crisis. The business that I am interning for is a real estate firm. Apart of the service they provide is rental property management. The firm essentially is an agent for the owner of the property and deals with the day to day management of the property and its tenants.

Unfortunately, tenants can feel frustrated by the administration of this process. This week a disgruntled present tenant took to the firm's social media to vent their frustrations over a delay in repairs to the property they were renting. I was told this is a common grievance among tenants.

My first thought was to delete the comment! After all, it was very negative and aggressive so that can only be bad right? Wrong! I thought about it carefully, consulted my supervisor and proceeded with the following strategy: take the conversation offline. (all those readings in contemporary practice came in handy!).

I replied to the person, as the business, and asked them to please call the relevant property manager on a direct number. I could not speak to the person myself because I am not trained in property management, and I didn’t have the full background of the property and the discussions on the issue. I let the property manager know the person would be calling and that it was important that the conversation was productive.

I was happy and thought the issue would be neutralised within the next 24 hours. I was wrong. The tenant chose to reply aggressively. The comment included profanity and personal attack on a staff member at the firm. Both professionally and ethically I felt out of my depth. Keeping in mind that the businesses reputation was on the line I decided to consult the Frist National Head office. I spoke to their communications team, they took over the matter from there and after another failed attempt had to remove the comments that contained the offensive language and blocked the user. The head office explained to me that they only do this where there is offensive language involved.

I was disappointed that I could not handle the situation myself, but it got me thinking about the ethics surrounding social media censorship. More specifically, the question: when is it ok to delete a negative comment about your business?

I did some reading on the issue both on online blogs and the few peer-reviewed articles I could find (“How large companies react to negative Facebook comments” by Sam H Dekay was interesting!). The consensus was that when comments contain derogatory, threatening, racist or other unacceptable language it is ok to remove them. However, if they do not the organization should not delete them. They should instead view it as constructive criticism and try and resolve the issue with the person offline.

After doing this research, I felt better about the choices I had made, and I feel like I learnt a lot from the experience.

Hello, I just wanted to add an edit to this post. upon reflection I feel as though this was actually more in the realm of an issue, rather than what we would as a full-blown crisis. 

Thanks,

Sarah