Empathetic Complaining 101

There was an intriguing article in the 12/7/2017 edition of Capacity Interactive’s blog about how to handle negative social media comments. It includes some thoughtful Q&A from a trio of arts marketers and by and large, it’s a very useful post.

About 2/3 of the way through the article, it dawned on me how fantastic it would have been to hear from someone on the other side of those social media exchanges. Specifically, Mr./Ms. Negative Commenter.

It would be fascinating to drill down into this topic by taking a retroactive look at how social media managers and negative commenters processed their respective exchanges and how it impacted their decisions at the time.

It’s not uncommon for some of an organization’s most supportive patrons to express negative feedback during something like a contentious labor dispute or a PR crisis. Conducting a post-mortem in a public setting has several potential benefits, not the least of which is hearing from patron stakeholders on whether efforts to process and respond to their negative feedback stuck the intended landing.

I don’t recall encountering anything over the years along these lines, but I would be fascinated to learn more about it if you have. If so, please take a moment to leave a comment with more information. In the meantime, I suppose we’ll have to wait until the next labor dispute or PR crisis to see if an opportunity presents itself for this sort of retrospective analysis.