How to deal…

Get it?? It's a Bully!

I did my last post mostly about customer service and how playing the social media game requires that we all learn to be customer satisfaction agents (ooh, I just came up with that, but I like it! is it trademarked anywhere you think?).

One other thing that comes to mind about ‘how to be a good social media manager’ for a company or business entity (even if it’s just you representing yourself) is that you have to have a plan to deal with unpleasantness.  The really bad stuff is easy.  I suggest being very public about a policy that outlines:

• What sort of language you’ll take action against (specify the language AND the action, usually for business, I consider any cursing or hate language to be a step across the line and the corrective action is deletion of the offending post)
• Do you have a policy about competitors posting? If so, what is it? (I think that deletion of ’spam’ comments is fair, for business, spam being irrelevant marketing/advertising on your space or persistent off-topic messages.)

But what do you do if someone is goading you? Or if someone is being repetitively mean without stepping over the cursing/spamming lines?

I had to deal with a situation like that recently, and it hadn’t occurred to me to be open prior to the situation how I would handle a thing like that (though to be fair, it didn’t occur that someone would actually do that, either).  Most people call it being a troll, and in retrospect, it’s probably a fair assessment, but at the moment, I was very torn about what to do.  Then, I received an apology from a 3rd party for the other person’s behavior, and I knew it wasn’t just in my head.  So I blocked the troll.  That didn’t necessarily make things easier (the so-called troll does interact with me in other spaces and basically put on a campaign to ask why I blocked them).  I explained my position, however, and generally the push back died away.  I don’t doubt that people disagree with the way I handled it, but I think they understood that I felt I needed to do something and blocking was the recourse I took.

Heck, I’m not even certain I agree with blocking, but it did stop the frequent stream of goading into our conversations and it protects the other users from the negative attitude, so it did its job.

So, all in all, I guess the moral of this post is to be prepared to handle situations you don’t think you’ll encounter.  No matter how clear you are about the ways you’ll handle the bad situations (again, those are pretty easy), it’s the not-as-terrible situations that are harder.  Good luck out there!