Juicing Lemons into Lemonade
It’s impossible for everything you do online to get a 100 percent “tickled pink” response. Even if you offered $1 million to the next five responders, you’d get criticized. It’s just human nature.
Whether you’re a seasoned hand online just looking to beef up your online reputation management and security, or a newcomer into this exciting space, I encourage you to keep doing, keep trying, and to pick yourself back up again if something goes amok. This is the only way you can get through the learning curve to where you want to go quickly.
Thankfully, the stakes tend to be pretty low when you’re starting out online. You should always be experimenting, trying new things — and sometimes that translates into falling flat on your face. It’s part of the experience. Oftentimes, people don’t even notice your mistakes. They’re too busy taking care of their own businesses to pay a lot of attention to what’s going on with somebody else online.
No great plan that goes sideways online is ever a waste of time if you’re appropriating valuable lessons from what did and didn’t work. It’s a process, not a formula.
Dealing with constructive criticism
Sometimes when you try something new and it doesn’t work out as planned, people will be kind enough to point out what you could’ve done better. Feedback loops like these can help keep you on track, at least in terms of technical issues and community considerations that may never have crossed your mind otherwise.
It’s pretty awesome to have free consultants sharing their best information and expertise with you. That happens a lot online when you put yourself out there with something new or different and the results aren’t perfect. I have lots and lots of experience with not-perfect.
When you throw your heart into what you’re doing, your positive energy shows and energizes the most surprising people, even total strangers, to
Share their best tips
Create graphics for you
Solve technical problems for you
Give you the benefit of their professional expertise
Rescue some aspect of your project
Oftentimes, comments of this nature will come from goodhearted people who like you and just want to see you grow faster and thrive. The most important thing you can do when you experience complaints, suggestions, and what I call “wish lists” online, is to sincerely thank those people for caring enough to pay attention to what you’re doing and share their perspectives with you.
When you thank a critic, you always look great. Specifically you
Demonstrate that you’re trustworthy. Responding with kindness demonstrates your humanity. Treating others the way you would want to be treated tends to come back to you in a good way. You receive more input from trustworthy people outside of your brand because they know that you will value their opinions and expertise. Even when the critic is wrong or is giving you awful advice, thanking him can create a loyal fan simply because you treated him with kindness.
Demonstrate your fallibility. You don’t know it all, and that’s okay because nobody possibly can. There’s such a rush of new information exploding at the seams every minute of the day that it’s impossible to know everything. Admitting this makes you a lot more approachable and like the kind of person whom most people would want to have as a friend.
Identifying room to grow
Once people have been kind enough to reflect back to you constructive criticism online, you may discover that there’s nothing that needs to be fixed per se but that they have identified room to grow. Sometimes the biggest mistake you can make in creating and expanding your online reputation is to forget about some areas of involvement that may well be crucial to your brand.
There will always be people who want you to do more (or fewer) videos, explore less popular social media networks, or write about their favorite subjects. Some people may contact you and object to your style or tell you that they absolutely love it and will stop paying attention to you if you ever change.
I encourage you to disregard these people and to plot your own course. Other people are often poor navigators. Have you ever watched a movie in which stranded people have to find their way out of a densely wooded forest without a compass? Even though every person will swear that he’s walking in a straight line and heading toward his destination, he ends up walking in circles.
People, even Fortune 100 companies, sometimes do this with their online reputation management without realizing it.
The only way you can truly build a strong and positive reputation online is to stay true to those decisions about where you want to go and what you want to do. Sometimes you may get off-track or decide that you need to make a change. This isn’t failure; it’s a learning curve.
Sometimes meaningful feedback can give you just the wake-up call you need to identify room to grow. Embrace it with an open mind and evolve your strategy past this if the criticism holds up to research, critical thinking, and your best instincts.
It’s a wild kingdom out there online, and nobody has all the answers. The best thing you can do when you discover that you’ve done something that wasn’t all that well received or that people downright hated is to pick yourself up, research, think it through, and change your direction toward something that makes better sense for you. And always, always thank people who are kind enough to reflect back something honestly structured, even if it doesn’t feel good.
Dealing with nonconstructive criticism
Occasionally, you may be dealing with somebody who attacks your brand, dismisses you, or just behaves like an outright troll. The more you choose to differentiate your brand from others online, the greater the chance you have of experiencing remarks like these.
On the plus side, you can take these actions as an indication that you’re different from your competitors and that you’re saying something provocative. After all, if you were better at blending in, you wouldn’t receive comments like these. But success online usually requires getting noticed — noticed for the right reasons, of course — and blending in won’t help you do that at all.