What do I do when someone leaves a negative comment on my blog?
- almost every person who’s attended one of our blogging seminars

The first step is not to panic. Have you ever gone to a restaurant where they screwed up your order? The meal can go two ways after that. The server might assume there’s nothing that can be done to salvage your experience and give you shoddy treatment the rest of the night. The other approach your server might take is to apologize, take responsibility for the mistake, and make it right. That might mean saying sorry, a free dessert, or getting the manager to comp your meal depending on how bad they screwed up.

If they handle it right, you’ll leave the restaurant even more impressed and pleased than you would have if the order had been right the first time. Sometimes seeing how someone responds to a problem is what makes you love them. The downside with the restaurant example: only one table got to see how the server responded in a crisis.

So back to the blogging scenario. Someone leaves a comment about a bad experience they had with you. Here’s your chance to respond to that person and make it right. Not only does the commenter see it, but everyone who reads that blog post will see it, too.

Update: everyone sees it because you are responding in the same forum: the blog comments. This is hugely important. See the comments of this post for an example. (Thanks, Robby.)

So what do you do? Here are the elements that should show up somewhere in your response.

• Apologize. Do it sincerely.
• Take responsibility. If there’s any part of the problem that was your fault, own up to it.
• Make it right. Offer an exchange at your expense. If you provide a service that wasn’t right, offer to go out and do it again for free.
• Thank them.

That last one may leave you scratching your head. What are you thanking them for? If there’s a problem with what your delivering to your clients, you need to know about it so you can fix it. Most clients who experience a problem don’t tell you. They simply move on to your competitors, and you never learn why. You’d pay a lot of money for a consultant to survey your clients to find out why they leave. When you find a client that goes out of their way to give you that information unsolicited, they deserve your appreciation.