This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Managing a Community.

Dealing with the negative can be a pretty scary proposition for any company stepping into social media marketing, let alone having to manage it with a community.  Some industries have a propensity for attracting negative opinions,  conversations and experiences for their audience.  Most of the time when people are sharing their negative experiences they are doing so because they were disappointed by the company in some way, shape or form.  Most likely it was not intentional, your customers can sometimes have very high expectations and when your company cannot meet those expectations the disappointment ensues.

Upset Customer or Constant Complainer?

These situations are opportunities for companies to step up and resolve the negative issues at hand.  If the person is sharing their experience in a somewhat rational manner, you can pretty well conclude that you have a disappointed customer on your hands.  How you respond and react to this situation is critical, you’ll either turn them into a raving fan or leave them even more disappointed and spreading their negative experience to all of their network.

But what about those “other people”, you know, the ones that will never be happy?  The ones that time and time again keep coming back at you telling you how horrible your company is?  What do you do with these type of people in social media communities?

Will They Ever Be Happy?

There’s a term for these types of people, when you’ve been in and out of many different communities you can easily spot them as well, a lot of communities refer to these types of members as “Trolls”.  Communities are smart, you can talk to that administrators and ask them “who are the trolls” and most likely they can readily point them out.  These people are the constant complainers or every other day there’s some injustice done to them.  Most of all no matter what anyone does or says, they are never happy – or the happiness is fleeting until the next day when some new unjust situation arises.

How do you know the difference between these “Trolls” and the “Disappointed Customer”?  There’s some tall tale signs that once you do your research into your social media communities you’ll be able to tell rather easily who are the people that tend to be legitimate & valuable contributors to the community and those who are just there to constantly complain.  More than likely those “trolls” aren’t just on one community spouting their story either, they are on several because at the end of the day their satisfaction is gained by the attention they receive by complaining.

Publicly Offer to Take the Conversation Out of the Community to Be Resolved

The best approach in dealing with these types of community members is to first acknowledge and then apologize for their negative experience.  Once you do that, then offer to speak to them about how you can amend the situation offline, give them the opportunity to contact you privately through the community’s messaging system.  This does two things, it stops the “troll” from saying “no one’s listening to me” or “they won’t do a damn thing”, then it also shows the rest of the community that you are serious about engaging with them and resolving even negative situations.  If you do this in a calm and professional manner, you’ll earn respect from the community members.

If the troll comes back and complains then that your resolution to the situation isn’t sufficient for them and they’ve displayed this pattern in the past, the influential community members tend to ignore or even step up for the company that offered to resolve the situation, putting the troll in their place.  Just resist the temptation to come back and “flame” the troll, this is what they want.  Sometimes silence or a controlled response is the best response.  The community has already seen you attempted to resolve the situation, and they most likely know this person is a constant complainer.  At the end of the day if you are true & transparent in your efforts with the community, your efforts won’t be ignored, but the troll’s constant complaining will be.

I’ve got a saying I like to share with companies dealing with situations like these:  “Don’t feed the Troll your baby goats, just pass by silently“

This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Managing a Community.

Whether you are just beginning to build a social media community, trying to revive one, managing a thriving one or wanting to become part of one, one thing is certain; none of those tasks can be accomplished unless you’ve built strong, solid relationships with the members of the community, both direct members and peripheral members, meaning the general community at large not specifically a niche community.

It takes time to build solid relationships that will help you manage a community.  Those relationships, those bonds of friendship that form, are built on a lot of trust and that just doesn’t happen overnight.  It happens by continually being of value to the other individual.  That value can take many forms, as we discussed in the Four Pillars of Social Media Marketing series, such as giving people content they find valuable, answering their questions, providing special incentive, being consistent with your words & actions and most of all, always saying thank you and you appreciate the other person’s time and contributions.

You can’t build solid relationships with community members by looking at them as another place to put your press release to test market your product or service.  If that’s all you’re into social media for, you might want to rethink your strategy and incorporate these 5 very important steps.

• Be Transparent

  The first thing any marketer needs to do when they are first stepping into any social media environment, whether its YouTube or a niche forum, is be transparent about who you are and why you are there.  If you aren’t honest about your intentions from the get go, you won’t be able to build any relationships, let alone solid ones.  The community is smart, they can smell a fake a mile away and when they uncover your true intentions, there’s no repairing those relationships that have been destroyed.

• Be Consistent with Your Words & Actions

  Everyone on your team and your company needs to be consistent with your messaging.  You can’t have the email team saying one thing and your social media team promoting something totally opposite.  You also can’t have one team offering something and another team saying that offer expired.  That does nothing for your creditability with the communities at large and makes members think your company has no clue what’s going on behind its own doors, and that does little to build the trust you need to build those solid relationships.

• Don’t Blatantly Market to Them

  Resist the temptation to just start pushing your products or services as soon as you step foot in a social media community.  To build solid relationships with key members of social media communities you have to realize that they are there to, first and foremost, share their own experiences.  Second on the list is to gain or acquire knowledge that they might not have had before.  They really don’t want to be marketed to.

• Appreciate Their Time & Contributions

  It takes time to share what people are experiencing.  Whether they write a blog post about it, shoot a video, or take pictures, that is still time the community member could have taken to do something else rather than share their experience with your product or service.  Even if it’s not the experience your company wants to hear about (no one really likes “Bad News”), you still need to be very cognizant of the time they took out of their day to contribute their experience.  They wouldn’t be doing it unless they really cared at some point in time.

• Always Say Thank You

  There’s something to be said for taking the time to say “Thank You”.  There’s even more to be said about taking the time to write one – more on that later next week when we talk about Rewarding a Community.  It takes only a few seconds to post a comment on a picture on a fan page, that a fan uploaded for you to say “Thanks for contributing”, or “really awesome picture, so thankful you share it with us”.  Making sure you thank the community and its members is a very important factor in building a solid relationship with them, not only does it show you appreciate them, it shows you aren’t taking advantage of them either.

Without solid relationships being built within your own community you’ll find it extremely difficult to manage and promote it all on your own.  There is definitely that aspect of “Being Social” to have a successful social media community that is needed.