Deciding how to engage your fans or customers is a tricky thing, it can make the easiest going of minds tremble with stress. It’s with good reason too; why would you hand over your reputation to another, or more importantly, rely on the internet to judge you fairly? After all, a myriad of studies have shown that people become anxious about posting comments for fear of being ridiculed, and the internet certainly is a lovely dark place filled with people who love to create tension and cause upset.

So if you’ve made the big step of setting out into the lawless internet badlands of tweets and YouTube comments, then some easy steps can be taken to control these meanies!

1. Engage them; don’t be scared to try and have a rational conversation with them. They want you to get mad and they want you to lose control, so don’t.

2. Ask direct questions and prove your point; you believe in what you’re selling or representing, so make them believe it too. If, however, they have a genuine criticism, then respect that and respond accordingly and honestly.

3. Don’t back down, but don’t lose you cool; if they realise they aren’t going to get a rise out of you – they will back off.

4. Keep your tone solid too; if you’re normally fun, then stay fun don’t change it up for them.

5. Don’t be afraid to block/report a user if they are being genuinely offensive for no reason. If comments are racist, personally offensive or vulgar then use the tools available to you to flag this behaviour.

As with all systems where a degree of anonymity is offered, you’ll find people just trying to provoke a reaction, the only way to deal with it is not to take it to their level. "not to be scared" is probably the best advice possible, don’t ignore them but don’t get in the pit and start slinging mud with them, they’ll soon get bored and move along to their next unsuspecting victim!


image theedmontonian.com