Curiosity kindles the conversation

Will and I had a meeting yesterday with a nice chap from a very large organisation that suffers a great deal from negative perceptions in the public and amongst their own staff.

Most companies have their naysayers, but for an organisation with tens of thousands of employees and millions of customers, the scale of criticism online can be enormous, with all sorts of blogs dedicated to complaining.

Putting aside the obviously number 1 priority task of dealing with the underlying reasons for the negativity (a massive struggle but well in-hand for this organisation,) how can they take steps to participate and bring some positivity to the conversations going on in the blogosphere?

Setting up a new blog in such a hostile climate is a daunting task with dire consequences if you get it wrong, but there is a low risk way to get a blog started, and take your first steps into the conversation.

The attitude that you need to take on your new blog is not to be defensive or go on a counter-attack, but to be curious and engaging.

In your first few posts you can link to some of the negative comment and attempt to understand and analyse the viewpoints, without ramming your own opinion down anyone's throat. Invite people to comment to check that your understanding is correct. It's amazing how attitudes can change when people know that you are listening.

Gradually you can begin to delicately put forward your own perspective which will be much more well received if you have visibly acknowledged the criticism.

Comments

[kelvin newman]

It's going to depend on their motivation to a certain extent as well.

Are they participating in the conversation because they over heard what people were saying and they didnt like it.

or

They've understood what people were saying but thought they had something to add they would help move the convo forward...

[Will McInnes]

Your best quote from that meeting was to encourage the client to adopt the mindset and behaviour of 'a curious editor'. I think that's a fantastic, simple real-world way to communicate a certain type of blogging behaviour to an audience of normal (e.g. not from our industry!) people.

[Tom Nixon]

It was certainly the former, Kelvin. It's our job as social media bods to explain how the medium works, and move them to the second category.

[Libby Davy]

yet again the basic principles of interpersonal communication are so beautifully (and perhaps not surprisingly) paralleled by the principles organisational communicators need to understand. The good old communications model of sender > receiver (feedback), as developed by the Bell phone engineers way back, still holds true.