Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

How NOT To Respond To Negative Publicity On a Blog

February 26, 2009 | Feature, Social Media

When you are a prominent blogger, sometimes you step on people’s toes. After all, we give opinions. A recent event, though, serves as a prime example of how NOT to handle it if you’re on the receiving end of it.

NOTE: I will not be mentioning the company or name of the person who started this. I am a nice guy and I want to allow him to learn from the experience.

Back in 2007, we did a review of a product. In the video, the features of the product were shown. However, Rich didn’t care for the product and he said it “sucks”. The review didn’t really go anywhere. It wasn’t that popular and it just fell into the archives.

Fast forward to 2009 and the guy behind this product emails us and asked us to remove the review. I didn’t reply. My thought is: “Is this guy kidding me?”. A couple days later, Rich gets an email (at his personal email address) which says the following:

  • He has reported us to the Florida Attorney General
  • That this is only the beginning.
  • That he is going to work with the attorney general to have PCMech shut down so that we will stop damaging honest hard working people.

Obviously, this got my attention. I didn’t really believe him, though, and it made me think just how much this guy doesn’t get it.

Lesson #1 – Don’t Ask Bloggers To Censor

The MOST incorrect thing you can do is ask a blogger to REMOVE a post because it is unflattering. Especially when you’re dealing with a large blog. Perhaps that might work with a small, beginning blogger who doesn’t know any better. But, it won’t work otherwise.

Bloggers are very sensitive to free speech issues, and rightly so. If I had decided to go public with what this guy was doing, much of the tech blogosphere would react to it and most likely not in a way which helps this guy’s cause. On the contrary, he would be publicly embarrassed and would do SO much more harm to his reputation than a short little review written in 2007.

Now, bloggers should never purposely say something inaccurate. There are laws against slander. But, saying something sucks is just an opinion.

I emailed the guy back. I told him that his tactic is the absolute wrong one and that, essentially, that isn’t a road he wants to go down for his own sake. I’m not going to remove the review, but I very politely offered to give his product a fresh review myself. After all, a lot of time has gone by and perhaps it has changed quite a bit.

But, I also gave him some much needed advice…

Lesson #2 – Tackle Negative Publicity Head On By Providing Truth

Now, I say “providing truth” for the purpose of advice, however we didn’t say anything in our review which wasn’t true. That said, the idea is that you publicly tackle the negative review head on. He should have posted a comment pointing out the positive reviews of the product, the features, and pointing out holes in our review.

By doing it publicly, he would have invited people to check out the product for themselves. And they would – out of curiosity. He would have also introduced a slight level of doubt as to Rich’s credibility, and thereby lessening the effect of the review. Obviously, I’m not interested in Rich’s credibility being questioned, but if I were on the receiving end of it, that’s how I would handle it. Instead, he issues no response publicly and simply threatens me to remove the review.

You also can use a negative review not only as an opportunity to improve, but as a lead-in to marketing. Without divulging the nature of the product in question, I will say that it is such that Rich’s review could have been used as one hell of a marketing opportunity by this guy. The product is such that a lot of people won’t like it at first, but there is the whole “old versus new” approach that would work quite well if this guy thought like a marketer.

So, respond publicly and use negative publicity to your advantage.

Lesson #3: Blogging Isn’t Journalism

His reply back to me did something I have never seen before. He threw me the standards of the Society of Professional Journalists and quoted some lines from it.

So, he obviously has a horrible misunderstanding of blogging. Blogging isn’t journalism any more than any web page on the Internet is a journalistic publication. A blog is just a medium. What the blogger does with it is up to him/her. This isn’t a newspaper business! If it were, blogs would all be failing kinda like the newspapers are.

I told him that PCMech is a communication medium. This isn’t the first time that a PCMech post has served as bad publicity for a product. But, we never censor. What I do is actively invite the company to respond and post comments. We speak. Our commenters speak. And the companies can speak, too. That’s how it goes.

My Thoughts

When it comes to social media marketing (and face it, getting coverage on a blog is part of a social media strategy), companies need to learn to LIVE with it. Learn to steer the conversation through participation, not by threats.

People are going to say what they think. Instead of fearing it, embrace it. Learn to accept it as reality and have a strategy in place to deal with it when it goes bad. Done right, it can be a huge advantage for you even when a piece of negative PR comes out.

Rich told me I had the patience of a saint in how I dealt with this guy. Perhaps. But, I’m a pro blogger. I know how this business works and I educate people on this blog about it every day. I understand that there are many who clearly don’t get it and this guy was one of them. I can either try to publicly humiliate him (which wouldn’t have been hard given the fuel he provided and my fairly large reach on the Internet), or I could try to educate him a little bit and bring him up to the year 2009.

President Obama didn’t get elected by suppressing speech in blogs. Instead, his campaign steered it and flooded the channels with his PR message. There’s something to learn from that.

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  • Richard60
    Some people just don't get it do they? These kinds of things can usually be worked out to the satisfaction of both parties if the one who feels wronged is willing to talk about it calmly and logically without threats. Dave is so right, blogging is not journalism, people who buy newspapers would never have the tolerance to put up with a bloggers mis-use of the English language, focusing on the mistakes, totally missing the point of the content.
  • Puts a totally different take on the idea of bloggers as journalists or not as journalists. If they're opinion factories, and things don't have to be vetted with the same standards as news copy, etc., then that gives bloggers a lot of leeway to circumnavigate issues like these. Great point and something worth thinking about.
  • Great info to calm fear, which you have talked about in the past. It sure can be a killer of any positive movement. Thanks for continuing with great advice.
  • I believe you have handled this in the best way. Ted Murphy tackled this during an episode of his rockstartup.com, any publicity is generally good for business but if he was that bothered by it - why did it take 2 years to do something about it?
  • Thanks.
  • Great post.

    Very useful and informative. Patience with people like that can definitely be difficult, but calm communication is always best.

    Thanks.
  • I have met a lot of businesses that are afraid of blogging because they might get negative feedback. Thanks for helping remind them that they can use it to their advantage.
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