My friend recently got a call from her university to tell her to stop blogging negatively about them. She had complained openly about the fact that they had changed her course structure without informing her, pushing her graduation date back another year. I went to the same institution and really loved it, but this is exactly what they taught me not to do when interacting with social media.
Their approach: Find a negative blog post about the university. Find out who wrote it, ring them and say: “Marketing found this blog post, it has a lot of swearing in it” and then intimidate the student into removing the post by reading the swearing back to them. The result is the student is still upset and the matter is not resolved. The student is likely to post negatively about the university again, but be more careful about maintaining anonymity so next time the criticism will be more enflamed and harder to track.
What organisations should do: Find a negative blog post. Find out who they are and why they wrote the post. Get in contact with them via the forum or blog they posted on. This is non-threatening and creates transparency. Ask them whether there is anything that they could do to improve the situation and what they can do to make sure the same mistake isn’t repeated. Apologise and follow up any leads on how the situation be rectified. The result is that the blogger may feel a little embarrassed about the encounter, but is likely to feel better about the organisation and is closer to finding a solution to their problems. Even if a solution can’t be found, the blogger is more likely to blog about the positive experience that they have had with the organisation trying to help them.
In this particular instance I know that my friend was helped out and her issue resolved, so she had already blogged positively about the help she received. Then she got the nasty phone call from the administration. Organisations should encourage people to comment and blog about their experiences with the company, good or bad, so that they can learn where gaps exist and be alerted to potential problems. This kind of open dialogue reflects well on organisations, whilst intimidation can cause much more damage than the original post.
You can’t bully people out of their opinions. Attempting to do so is likely to make the chatter worse.