Weathering a blogstorm
Written on April 18, 2008 by Conor O'Neill
One aspect of blogging (particularly business blogging) that worries some people is when something negative is written about them. This can sometimes erupt into a blogstorm with a huge hullabaloo across multiple blogs. I’ve seen a few over the past few years and each company/person handled it differently.
Frank Prendergast has written a very thoughtful post on this topic and I’ll be recommending it to all new (and old!) bloggers. The essence of his advice is to keep a level head, state your case, apologise if you are in the wrong and move on. It’s an approach I’ve always tried to use despite emotion getting the better of me sometimes.
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Thanks Conor, having experienced being in the middle of a blogstorm once or twice and having watched a couple unfold I thought it would be worthwhile putting my thoughts together - particularly for bloggers who might not have a tech bent - I think we forget very easily how much experience is needed before one instinctively has a feel for online behaviour.
And even then, as you say, when things start to feel personal, emotion can blind us to the best approach!
One thing we should all ask ourselves before writing something online is “would I be comfortable saying this to someone’s face?”. I’m as guilty as anyone of going overboard with online criticism but it’s still a useful rule of thumb.
Absolutely. Criticism is an easy content generation tool, and relied on far too much by far too many.
The face to face rule of thumb is a good one, as it allows for criticism but helps one frame it in a constructive way.