Keeping up a pristine illusion of purity by keeping all negative dialog off your site is a good step towards being out of touch with your market. It ensures that people will go elsewhere to address their real concerns and problems, rather than engage with you.

That said, there are many kinds of negative comments and people who write them, and you have to be smart about how you handle them, whether the dialog is taking place on your own site or somewhere else on the Web. To get your arms around the strategies for navigating negativity, it’s helpful to break the kinds of discussion down into categories.

Problems and Complaints

By far the most likely kinds of negative comments you’re going to find—on your own site and across the Web—are the result of problems people have had with your products or services, real or imagined. Most of these problems may be customer service and support issues, but don’t think your call center, trouble-ticket system, knowledgebase, chat line or email support is going to stop people from airing their complaints in public.

I know it annoys companies when customers don’t neatly file into the channels that have been created for them to solve problems. But when customers show up on message boards, it’s rarely because they want to start a grudge match. Sure, there are a few wing nuts, but most people post problems in public because they still have a problem they can’t resolve and they’re looking for help. If you don’t resolve those problems quickly, they become a trail of indictments against your brand helpfully indexed by Google.

The advantage of hosting a place on your own site for problems and complaints is that you can resolve problems more quickly. Many companies, especially in technology, are hosting peer support forums where customers can provide help to each other.

Negative Opinions

Less frequent, but often more insidious than product or service complaints, are negative opinions about your brand. These are less likely to be an issue on your own site than elsewhere on the Web, because they aren’t focused on resolving a specific problem. They’re also challenging to engage, because they’re emotionally laden and often not rational. Imagine mediating an argument between a Mac and PC user, and you get the idea.

The best baseline strategy for dealing with negative opinion is to acknowledge it and move on. Start with the litmus test of whether or not the person is trying to solve a real problem now. If they’re just going off on past injuries, or commenting about everything that’s wrong with your company, your best bet is to say, just once, “I’m sorry you feel that way, if there’s something specific I can do to help you, please let me know.”

Do not let yourself get dragged into an argument trying to defend the honor of your brand. Usually those arguments are not about substance but about energy, and you’re feeding into it by staying engaged. If you feel that something must be stated, do so as concisely as possible and disengage. Do not try and have the last word. Keep in mind that most readers on the sidelines are pretty rational, and if it looks like someone is being irrational, they’ll see it as well.

If you’re hosting your own social media site and you find people abusing the forum by posting needlessly negative or repetitive posts, you have the option of banning them. This is a useful tool if used sparingly. Make sure you have a clear policy stating what you will and will not allow, and follow it consistently. (Example) At all costs, resist the temptation of blocking or removing comments that you simply don’t agree with, or find uncomfortable. You’ll quickly lose the credibility of your community, and your social media experiment will be compromised.

Crisis and Scandal

Social Media can empower customers to create a unified voice, which can also look like a brush fire. Apple’s recent discount debacle would never have been a crisis without the accelerant of social media. But how can you predict what might become a crisis at the start?

The best way to assess what may become a crisis is to do a quick inventory by putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. Is this something that I’m likely to experience as well? Does it prevent me from fulfilling the product’s promise? Is it something I would reasonably expect not to happen, or to be resolved quickly by the company? Is this being discussed in a high-profile venue, or by a high-profile author? Is this something I’d pass along to someone else or comment on myself?

If you answer yes to any of those questions, the least you should do is prepare yourself with the information needed to respond effectively. If you doubt the content is explosive, you can monitor the follow-up dialog before jumping in, or you may decide to announce yourself and solicit more information to resolve the issue in a helpful way. If you think it is a potential crisis—a major product catastrophe or corporate scandal—the best thing you can do is rapidly prepare the same way you would for a PR crisis. Get all the facts you can. Respond quickly with what you know about the situation, what you’re doing in your commitment to resolve it, and follow up as you get more information on the crisis. Never, ever get ahead of the facts in an emerging crisis and speculate on the problem or the outcome.

If you’re worried about having to handle a true crisis some day, there’s plenty of good material on the Web to help you prepare.

Conclusion

Whether or not you launch a social media project that opens the door to potentially negative comments on your own site, get used to the challenge of resolving negative comments about your company online. People are using social media tools to get informed about products and to resolve problems with products they own. Inevitably your brand will be in the cross fire some day, and my advice is to get out and learn the ropes early. It’s not going to get any easier, and it’s a skill that could be a competitive advantage.

When you’re dealing with negative issues, keep a cool head and stay focused on resolving specific problems. Treat everyone you engage with respect, listen as well as you can, and don’t ever let yourself get dragged into personal arguments or mudslinging. Comments online have a very long shelf-life and are powerfully indexed. If you stay positive, respectful and helpful, you gain a lot more from what you communicate about your brand than you might from winning an argument.