Someone’s talking to my organisation using social media – what do I say back?
Hel Reynolds
Author of this post
Hel is social media trainer and boss of Comms Creatives.
She has been working in comms since 2005, and has been brushing up her expertise in social media for brands since the good old days of MySpace.
She also draws the Comms Cartoons, and is usually attached to a mug of coffee.
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Interesting post. I would hope that your organisation has a detailed strategy for dealing with abusive/malicious social media posts. After all local government is often a target for the (not always justifiably) disgruntled. Don’t you think that you should try to engage unhappy customers offline rather than risk a protracted slanging match in public?
Thanks for your comment, really interesting points. We’ve not had any abusive or malicious yet so far thank goodness but we have a protocol on how we would deal with that.I agree that a slanging match is not ideal and I’d argue that only skilled communicators should enter into that territory – communicators who can calm, rather than inflame. I talk from a public sector perspective but I think the principle applies to business – open and tranparent organisations publicly answer an opposing viewpoint to give information to other people who use that medium who feel the same way but they don’t engage. That is, it’s an opportunity to reach those who don’t publicly complain.Local government is often subject to unjust criticism, agreed, but by treating people’s views with public acknowledgement and respect, I’d argue we have a more receptive audience to our side of the story.I suppose what I’m looking not turning someone around to ‘our’ point of view necessarily, but making sure ‘they’ know both sides of the argument so they can have an informed opinion. And ‘we’ have better knowledge the views of our stakeholders.That’s what I think anyway 😉