One of the biggest concerns we hear about from corporations is “if we have a blog, people will be allowed to comment, and they could say bad things about us.”

Exactly. That’s what you want.

This concern, more than anything, seems to keep the corporate lawyers up at night, and is the number one reason why blogs and social media ventures are killed before they ever start. (Don’t worry, I won’t turn this into a rant on why lawyers shouldn’t be allowed to make marketing decisions. But they shouldn’t. Ever.)

Mitch Joel said in his blog, Six Pixels of Separation:

Most company Blogs blow because companies understand only one-way dialogue (from their mouths to our ears). The companies that are great at it (and the good folks over at the The Blog Council were kind enough to point some of them out over here: Here are a few trustworthy corporate blogs) are the ones that understand the new two-way dialogue or, as Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody) calls it, the “group expression.”

Basically, if you don’t want your blog to blow, you want that two-way conversation with people. You get that by allowing comments on your blog, and never, ever moderating them, including the negative stuff. You want people to air their complaints, express their frustrations, and say why they disagree with stuff you do. If you block comments, you come off looking bad.

(NOTE: It’s important to point out that negative comments do not include abusive, vulgar, mean, racist, sexist, or derogatory comments. You can get rid of those all you want.)

1. It lets you deal with customer service problems. If someone is unhappy with your product or service, you want them to air that complaint on your website, because it lets you fix the problem publicly. People who visit your site and see the complaint get to see what you did to fix it. You look like a caring company, and it improves your standing in future customers’ eyes.

2. It reduces the number of comments made in other places. Most people only have so much time and energy to devote to a complaint. They’ll post a few comments in different places before moving on to the rest of their day. Make sure one of those comments is your site, not another site you didn’t discover. Then, you get to fix the problem, as per #1

Comcast was so opposed to allowing customers to interact with them that NPR radio host Bob Garfield created ComcastMustDie.com, an angry blog and website that let customers post all sorts of complaints about the cable giant. It wasn’t until thousands of people piled on complaints and the site got all sorts of media attention, that Comcast finally realized they had a problem. If only they had started a blog and fixed a problem (as in item 1), Garfield would never have gotten so angry that he started his own anti-Comcast movement.

3. It encourages conversation with your customers and fans. Social media is no longer about the broadcast one-to-many model of communication. It’s a two-way conversation. I’ve had several conversations with customer service people in my day-to-day dealings with other people. The companies I liked best were the ones whose customer service people had conversations with me. The ones I didn’t were the ones who tried to avoid speaking with their customers at all.

4. It humanizes the corporation. Right now, corporations are often seen as faceless automatons or inflexible martinets who won’t post directions to the bathroom without a ten-page review from Legal. But a blog with comments will make your company seem like real people. Remember, people buy from people they like. They get angry with people they can’t talk to. Do you want people to buy from you or be angry with you? If they’re angry with you, you could be on the wrong end of someone like Bob Garfield.

5. If you don’t, you could get hit by the Streisand Effect. That’s what happens when you censor or remove information, and it gets widely publicized. The Church of Scientology saw it happen when a leaked Tom Cruise video hit the Internet. The first sites were threatened by the church to remove it or else, but other sites already had it in place. Soon, hundreds and thousands of sites were showing the video. Too many for the church to keep up with, so they gave up, after giving it more traction than the video ever would have gotten on its own. The moral is: if you censor blogs or moderate or edit comments of people who disagree with you, you’ll end up creating a bigger monster.

If you want to make your blog work for you, enable your comments. If you want to be seen as yet-another uncaring, unfeeling, faceless corporation whose latest problems will be revealed at YourCompanyMustDie.com, by all means shut off your comments.

Your customers will still be talking about you. You just won’t know about it.

About the Author: Erik Deckers
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.

Tags: blogging, comment moderation, comments, corporate blogging
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