Social Media – Making Comments and Controlling Comments to Generate Business

You may remember the term “Web 2.0” which meant so many things that it became meaningless jargon. But at it’s core was the idea that the internet was originally developed as a collaboration tool, where people could exchange information, ideas and questions. Social Media is a key part of that vision, especially for businesses to move forward from providing just a static, broadcast website.

Using social media tools to comment on the web, and encourage comments from people is a great way of building a presence and relationships to generate business. However you also need to be wary of what others are writing about your business on these services, and take action accordingly.

COMMENTING

You don’t need to do much to get involved with social media. Registering some basic details with services like Blogger, Facebook and Twitter lets you take part by submitting comments to the system, thus raising your profile in the particular community:

• By commenting on blogs
• By getting involved in on-line forums, especially in helpfully answering other people’s questions
• By bringing yourself and your business to a site manager’s attention, and to other followers of that site. This can be done for example by commenting on someone’s Facebook wall, sending a Twitter tweet to someone, or simply following someone on Twitter.

Everything in moderation, with aggressive selling likely to be counter-productive.

CONTROLLING COMMENTS

Operators of commercial social media sites are keen to gain followers, and to hear from those people to generate relationships and business.

However there are three categories of comments that are not welcome:

• Overt sales messages, especially by competitors. With music acts for example, there is a distinct line between one band complementing another publicly, and another using the platform as a way to also sell their own gigs or download.
• Unpleasant comments, which may be unsavoury photos, soundtracks, videos or links to other web pages
• Derogatory comments, especially if unfounded

In the latter case, this can be on sites over which you have no direct control, such as TripAdvisor and FourSquare. Sadly there are a number of cases coming through of businesses going bust due to scathing, unsubstantiated comments.

So what can you do to leverage the benefits of social media tools, without suffering the downsides? To take a few examples to set the principles:

Blogs

This article has been written in Google’s blogging tool “Blogger”. It provides three key facilities:

• Option whether to allow comments or not
• If allowed, whether you want to “moderate” comments before they appear on your blog
• Opportunity to remove offending comments that already appear on your blog

Other popular blogging tools such as Wordpress will have their own set of facilitites.

Facebook

Firstly you need to decide whether to have a standard wall or use the “Pages” facility designed to be used by businesses. Pages look very similar to personal profiles, but amongst other things allows posts to the wall to be clearly separated between those made by the business and by visitors. To compare the two approaches, with a mixture of text, photos, videos and soundtracks, here are two bands:

• Theory of Six Degrees (as personal profile)
• Turisas (using  business pages)

For Pages, you have the choice:

• Allow/stop postings to the wall
• Allow/stop photos to be added
• Allow/stop videos to be added

For personal profiles (within “Customise Settings” within “Privacy Setings”), you can:

• Allow/stop friends from posting to your wall
• Allow/stop friends from commenting on your own posts
• Block specific people from making posts

You cannot moderate other people’s posts on your wall before they happen, but you can remove anything you don’t want.

Twitter

Twitter is a public system, without the concepts in blogs or Facebook. You have little if any control on what people post about you or your business. However you can:

• Block people from using your Twitter @username in tweets, firstly so they cannot address a tweet to you, and secondly so others can’t see any further tweets with your @username in it. However this doesn’t stop the username without the @ being used
• Monitor tweets featuring your username, and where necessary counter.

Remember that libel laws are applicable to Twitter and other social media systems, which you can leverage should there be any untruths tweeted about you or your business.

Foursquare and other public systems that allow comments

I was sitting in a hotel bar and decided to see what others had recommended about the place on FourSquare. All I could find was a derogatory comment about the bedrooms. The staff on duty had no idea about this, nor did the comment appear at all reasonable to them. As comments now appear in services like Bing maps, the so-called “tips” can spread far and wide without readers needing to be on the premises.

Valid complaints can be dealt with on the relevant service. The way you do this can actually have a positive affect not only on the person involved, but also those people who can see what you let be seen.

But what if you want to remove a derogatory comment or incorrect tip? It depends on the specific service. In the case of Foursquare, the first step is simply to send an email to Foursquare

IN CONCLUSION

There are a variety of ways that you can take part in social media to further your business, whether on other people’s sites or by setting up your own.

But be aware that not everyone plays ball fairly. You need to keep an eye on what people are saying about your business on each platform, and take appropriate action where necessary.

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