Many small businesses, bookkeepers and accounting firms are blogging, using LinkedIn groups, Twitter and Facebook. So I thought it was high time to raise the issue of how do you deal with negative comments.

Our own business and personal blogs are the depth of our experience. We have been blogging for 10 years soon so we do have lots of practical experience but would love to hear your ideas on topic. We also have many clients in the industry that we have discussed this issue with so we bring that to the comment table also.

Mostly comments we get about Saasu are great. We also get comments which are frustration that we don’t have something, nearly always a feature, that customers want. We try to make the point that we are what we are. We don’t view these as negative comments, we welcome them unless the writer really starts to make us out to be a bad guy for not having built something yet. That’s akin to flogging a slave. The hardest people to deal with are the ones who are negative constantly, they often do this without full knowledge of the issue at hand. They often bring attitude and worst of all inaccurate assessments into the picture. So how do you handle this type of activity if you are a blogger, manage a twitter account or have a face book page?

We prefer to let people have their view, moderate in extreme cases only where they are outside the rules of moderation you set.

At the end of the day if you have lots of negative something is wrong with your business. It should be mostly positive (if you are a product and service business). Commentary types blogs invite debate so expect more negative comments. I find these comment streams really interesting to read so it’s great when the comments are left even if it’s just for entertainment value.

Laurel Papworth is one of the best people I have seen cover this topic and she has produced an excellent short video that highlights 7 ways to approach a negative person in your streams. It’s a guide so work out your own list and mixture.