Social media can appear a very unfriendly and rude place at times. However, with a mix of common sense, preparation and careful management you can steer around the unsociable corners and bask in the benefits of the social ones.

Only a few years ago the simple news that someone was joining Twitter was often newsworthy. Now it is commonplace and only newsworthy when it involves the most prominent of people.⁵⁰ But Twitter still hits the mainstream news far more regularly than that – particularly with stories of people being questioned by the police for what they have tweeted.

Beneath all the debate over how far the law should circumscribe what people can say on Twitter, there is widespread agreement that social media contains all sorts of unsociable, rude, drunk or threatening comments at times. No surprise either – for social media is made up of humans and humanity has always had its unsociable edge.

Just as the rest of our lives does not have to be over-run with such behaviour, nor does our slice of social media. It is a matter of choice. Not a matter of easy, neat, perfect choice but choice nonetheless. We have control over where we go, what we do and how we interact with others. Just as avoiding walking past a downmarket pub at chucking out time is a sensible way to avoid problems on a Friday night, so too we decide where we go and what we do online.

Offline this can seem a chore, unreasonably cramping our freedom. Online, it is easier to make those choices, exert that influence – and not feel our freedom has been nearly as cramped. Easier, that is, if you understand how to make the choices and which ones matter most.

The three problems to avoid

For those acting at the intersection of public relations and social media, there are usually three related problems to avoid. First, saying something that either gets you or your firm the sack or has the police come calling, makes you an instant inductee into the “How not to do social media” Hall of Fame.

Second, having a social media presence over-run with hostile or – even worse – mocking comments and feedback.

The third is often forgotten, but is one to cling to dearly as you navigate round the first two. That is to become so scared of the results of interaction that you close your ears to the negative comments out there (and stick your hands over your clients' ears too). It is a danger because sometimes the critics are right. There might actually be something useful or even urgent to learn amid the hyper-ventilating angst.

It is also worth remembering that the exceptionally rude person throwing invective your way may be more deserving of sympathy than ire. For all the warnings about the modern habit of prescribing a medical explanation to everyone's behaviour, there are people with mental health issues and they do use social media. I am pretty sure, for example, that the one case I have directly experienced where online abuse turned into a series of seriously unpleasant phone calls was due to someone who needed medical help.

Even such exceptional cases aside, listening is good. A while back I found myself surrounded by litter as a firm's cleaners had failed to do their job properly. I took to social media to let them know. The result? Silence. What could have been an opportunity to identify someone who wasn't doing their job properly – or was being asked to do too much and so couldn't do their job properly – was instead consigned to the internet dustbin. My frustration but their loss.

This is why Walmart took so enthusiastically to social media. For a firm often at the centre of public controversy, it may seem surprising they were so keen to embrace a medium through which people could readily knock them. What Walmart's senior managers appreciated, however, was that the easier it is for people to moan, the easier it is for them to pick up just the sorts of problems – a faulty product, a badly run store – which might otherwise slip through their management systems or only percolate upwards slowly. Listening to complaints is a vital safety net to cover the inevitable slip-ups which occur in even the best managed systems. As with offline life, the skill is to manage and sort criticism, not hide hermit-like in electronic isolation ignoring everyone.

With that in mind, how best then to tackle the other two problems?

Staying out of trouble

The first – how to avoid saying something that causes trouble – is the most straightforward, at least in theory. Unless you deliberately wish to be edgy and court controversy (which can be a route to publicity and success, of course), simply avoid saying things online which you would not want either a job interviewer to have read just before you walk into the room or your mother to see just before you turn up for Christmas. (Substitute father/aunt/vicar/Richard Dawkins depending on your own family and faith setup.)

In theory, privacy settings can be your friend and ally – you simply carve out space for offending comments without them ever being seen, in theory. The practice is somewhat harder.

Mistakes are easy to make, especially as privacy settings become increasingly complicated and span multiple services supplied by the same firm. In fairness to those writing the accompanying text, these days they are often in fairly plain English but even simple sounding phrases can be tricky to fully fathom. A multitude of simple choices itself often ends up being confusing.

Whilst writing this, I took a look at all the privacy settings Facebook offers me. I got up to 86 different options before getting bored with counting. Even with each of them being apparently simple choices to make, the odds of me getting one wrong out of the 86 plus are non-trivial. Then there is the problem of keeping up with changes to the privacy settings, not to mention changes in who you want to see your “private” content as your life and career evolve.

What that all means is that privacy settings are a handy tool for refinement but a pretty poor safety net. More like a safety colander. The real protection comes from not putting content online in the first place.

How to manage feedback and responses

Turning then to the second problem: that of how to manage the quality of user feedback and user-generated content on the social media presences of clients.

Handling and minimizing anti-social behaviour online has some similarities with doing so offline, and these similarities make the “broken windows theory” of criminologists a useful starting point for planning your online approach.

In the offline world, there is good evidence that allowing low-level problems (such as graffiti and broken windows) to fester in a community ends up encouraging more criminal behaviour. Tackling the low-level problems, by contrast, helps to prevent more serious problems too, as otherwise seeing the fruits of other people's bad behaviour encourages more and worse bad behaviour.

As one writer put it, applying this to the online world:⁵¹

Search engines also kick in an extra problem. If you have spam comments appearing on a site or page, it makes it look less trustworthy and reputable in the eyes not only of your readers but also search engine algorithms, hitting your search engine prominence.

Therefore, the first step is to make sure you select platforms for your online activities which provide appropriate environments to encourage good behaviour and allow you to moderate. This can require quite subtle technological knowledge and experience at times. For example, Facebook generally has a better tone of conversation than many other platforms because nearly everyone on it uses their real name, with their comments closely associated with who they really are. However, the Facebook comments feature on third-party websites offers only relatively crude moderation options, which can more than cancel out the other Facebook benefits.

Take a look at existing users of a platform to see what sort of comments tend to appear. YouTube, for example, is well known for the less than salubrious nature of many of its comment threads. That may not be a reason to avoid it, but it means going in with your eyes open.

Then, based on this background knowledge, make sure you go through all the moderation and discussion options. For example, on YouTube many people now choose to disable all comments – avoiding the non-salubrious problem whilst still allowing interaction by embedding the videos on their own sites.

It is important to decide whether or not to take the option, where offered, of “pre-moderating” everything: that is only letting comments appear after they have been approved. This provides a sure quality control but comes at a cost. It means the pace of online conversation is slowed. It also can come with a legal risk. If you pre-moderate everything and then publish a libellous comment, your legal defences are much weaker than if you automatically publish everything and only moderate after the event.

Whichever approach you take, alongside the technical decisions you should have a transparent (and sensible!) moderation policy, both as a guide for your work and also as an answer to public questions about what is being done and why.

Often a good starting point is the BBC's rules, though bear in mind that they are perhaps a little more prescriptive and a little longer than you might need:⁵²

• We reserve the right to fail comments which …
• Are considered likely to disrupt, provoke, attack or offend others.
• Are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable.
• Contain swear words or other language likely to offend.
• Break the law or condone or encourage unlawful activity. This includes breach of copyright, defamation and contempt of court.
• Advertise products or services for profit or gain.
• Are seen to impersonate someone else.
• Include contact details such as phone numbers, postal or email addresses.
• Are written in anything other than English – Welsh and Gaelic may be used where expressly stated.
• Contain links to other websites which break our Editorial Guidelines.
• Describe or encourage activities which could endanger the safety or wellbeing of others.
• Are considered to be “spam”, that is posts containing the same, or similar, content posted multiple times.
• Are considered to be off-topic for the blog discussion.

What the BBC also has, and you should too, is an escalation policy so everyone knows how to deal with something which appears more serious – such as an allegedly libellous comment or something which gives out personal information about someone that is inappropriate. Make sure you know where the relevant expert advice will come from and who makes the decisions if such an event were to happen on your site.

Alongside this, you should have an effective spam filter (or be using a platform that has one built in). The volume of spam comments posted up on even low-traffic blogs can be eye-watering. There is good and free or cheap software that saves you from having to manually handle such voluminous crud.

Think about how you might want to structure feedback to help the quality rise. Should you have options to let people vote on it or options to let particular pieces of feedback be highlighted as star contributions? Letting readers vote comments up or down, for example, can encourage group think and the dominance of the majority view rather than debate and diversity. Think how rare it is to see someone say, “I think your view is totally wrong but it is an interesting contribution to the debate so thank you for making it.” Instead, they just hit the thumbs down button.

Consider how you plan to respond. Just as a good meeting chair can bring out the best of an audience or pander to its worst, so interaction can encourage or discourage the non-window breakers. Respond positively, thank people, answer questions and follow up complaints. That encourages better interaction and helps drive the bad aside.

When doing so, ignore – yes, ignore – the advice “don't feed the trolls”. You should feed them – once. There are many reasons why people may appear to be trolling but are actually redeemable. One polite attempt at giving them a second chance is worthwhile. It will not always work, yet is worth trying.⁵³

Conclusion

Remember you cannot control other people's behaviour on the internet, but you can set the environment and you can influence it. Get that right and the unsociable side of social networking becomes an occasional annoyance rather than a serious problem.

Biography

Dr Mark Pack (@markpack) works at Blue Rubicon, PR Week's Consultancy of the Year. He is also a Visiting Lecturer at City University on its journalism programme and ran the Liberal Democrats' 2001 and 2005 internet general election campaigns.

This is the 23rd book he has contributed to as an editor or author, including 101 Ways To Win An Election, co-authored with Ed Maxfield.