The power of unmoderated communities

One of the most impressive things about Twitter is the way that it focuses instantaneous attention and creates entirely self-organizing communities.  One of the downsides from a marketing perspective is that it is very hard to limit the influence of other users in a conversation within twitter. 

So what happens when responses to your tweets go negative?  It's not possible to silence such negativity, and drawing attention to it with a reply might feed the fire.  How can you be positive about something negative?  Here are some suggestions:

1. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: the difference between a flame war and a discussion is the way that parties seek common ground.  The more you seek common ground, the better you look and the less dramatic the negative can really be.

2. Candid, not canned:  If your twitter presence represents a company or its marketing efforts, the best thing you can do is acknowledge that your critics have a valid point.  Ignoring the voice of consumers is the story of marketing past; instead of talking only about the positives, corporate spokespeople and all their ambassadors have the power to be realistic, open-minded, and human. 

3. With great power comes great responsibility: The power to connect through "social" media isn't just an invitation to create more impressions, or free impressions, but instead to use the metaphor of person-to-person interaction for communication between people and brands/products. The more a brand uses its presence as a media buy, or another e-mail list, or a bulletin board, the worse it will be. Instead, bring forward the human parts of your company: people, who have opinions, and ideas, and  hopefully care as much about supporting and selling the product as customers do about buying and owning it. 

4. Be a good friend: When social media uses the metaphor of personal connection, the power to drive sales, pass along brand messages, and increase customer loyalty comes with certain obligations.  Just as we wouldn't stay friends with a person who talked without listening, are products so different? In friend relationships, we maintain our own personal motivations, but our friends' opinions about our actions usually matter.  They become stakeholders in our lives.  When corporations fail to take the same approach, people notice. 

I'm a little late to the party here, but this came up at work today and I really wanted to think it through.  Chrissie's Don't feed the trolls post has great ideas as well.