Should You Police Your Community?

The issue of negative comments is one that every brand who signs up for a Facebook Page has to deal with. Although this could be an issue within a Group, especially if it is around an industry topic that might cause some level of debate, you will more likely feel this concern around Facebook Pages. The reason being, of course, that the comments or content is public. It can be seen by all.

Of course, with the hundreds of millions of users, some people have probably had a bad experience with your company. Although in an ideal world only positive information would be talked about publicly by others, this certainly is not the case. Many corporations when I meet with them for the first time are weary of knowing what people are saying about them. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Right? Wrong. These conversations are taking place 24 hours per day, and your ability to find them and respond is critical.

So, someone posts something negative on your Wall, what do you do? Easy, right? Just delete it and move on. You want only the positive and fun content around your community. Makes perfect sense. Except if you do this, you’ll be committing a cardinal sin of online brand engagement.

There are going to be people, both online and offline, who are not happy with your brand, product, or service for one reason or another. Online they can leave comments within your various online outposts, such as your Facebook Page or Group. If the comment isn’t violent, overly disruptive, or continual, leave the comment alone. You then have to make the decision whether to respond to the comment. Both decisions have positives and negatives. On one hand, if you do respond, it could spark a never-ending back and forth that might only add lighter fluid to a smoldering fire that would have otherwise put itself out. However, on the other side of the coin, if you don’t respond, you appear as though you’re ignoring the person or complaint she is bringing to your attention. This could also have an adverse effect. The bestadvice is to judge each comment on a case-by-case basis. Some you’ll respond to whereas others you’re going to make the decision that it’s best to leave it alone.

To monitor and respond to any comments about your executives, company, industry, or competitors, plenty of professional grade tools, such as Radian6 (www.radian6.com), are available. Radian6 enables you to actively measure mainstream news, blogs, blog comments, forums, forum replies, and, currently, micromedia sites that include Twitter and FriendFeed. One of the downfalls of Facebook being a closed platform is that tools such as Radian6 can’t “see” behind the walls to monitor the conversations that are taking place. However, it will be interesting to see how Facebook continues to extend its new search feature and how it decides to integrate FriendFeed. FriendFeed is currently one of the sites that tools such as Radian6 can measure. The other issue is that you can’t grab an RSS feed or set up an email alert to trigger based on criteria that you plug into Facebook. This is bound to happen now that Facebook is going through the process of integrating FriendFeed in and making lots of other platform enhancements, I think we’ll see the search capabilities extend to RSS or email alerts.

While we wait for some type of RSS or alert capabilities arrive to the Facebook platform, you should run searches from time to time. Run searches for your company, executives, products, services, and industry. This can give you an idea of what, if anything, is said within the Walls of Facebook. Though not perfect, it is a start to monitoring the conversations taking place around you on Facebook. For everything else, I’d strongly consider setting up a listening and monitoring tool such as Radian6. If you just want to dip your feet in, you could start by setting up Google Alerts and custom Twitter Searches around the terms that matter to you.

Source of Information : Facebook Marketing Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign

Should You Police Your Community?