Google_ for Business_ How Google's Social Network Changes Everything - Chris Brogan [37]
Be very clear about what you decide to remove from your comments. If you are Sony Electronics and someone from Kodak comes onto your post and talks about a competing camera, that’s probably a moment worth discussing with your team before you make your next move. My professional advice would be to leave the comment as long as it’s respectful. Your company policy might be different.
In a similar vein, say you represent the Alabama Power Company, and someone comes on to complain that his power bill is higher than ever before and that the power company stinks. This comment should be permitted to stay. It’s an opinion, and it’s not slanderous or otherwise. Instead, what should come soon after that comment is a response from someone at Alabama Power offering a phone call to review the customer’s bill and seek an understanding of what might have happened or changed.
Deleting negative impressions of your company or organization has a negative impact, actually. In a survey I’ve long since forgotten the source of, I read that 70% of customers facing a web page that shows only positive impressions and reviews reported that something was “wrong,” even though they couldn’t always put their finger on the cause of this. This should be at the top of your priorities when deciding how to moderate comments on your posts.
Disabling Comments and Reshare
Now consider two more posting options. The first is whether you want to disable comments for a post. I’ve seen this used successfully when someone chooses to reshare someone else’s post but wants the comments to fall into that original post and not end up on the shared post. Walk through an example.
Shilpa, the director of Consumer Experience, posts a video asking potential customers what they think of a new feature. Anil, the vice president of Research and Development, reshares Shilpa’s post to his audience by pushing Share under the post after it comes up in his stream. Upon publishing that share, Anil rushes to the upper-right corner of the post and selects Disable Comments. He then puts text above the share of Shilpa’s video that says, “Please comment on Shilpa’s original post.” People aren’t obligated to click through and comment, obviously, but this encourages that outcome, at least.
The other option you can enable is to Lock This Post. This comes in handy, for instance, if you’re sharing something with a select circle, such as your Community Managers circle, and you don’t want the information going out into the general Google+ stream. Other times you might not want to share a post beyond the initial target circle because it’s something you’d like to keep under wraps to some extent.
The Importance of Sharing
The next chapter talks about how all this stuff in this chapter can be used, and that includes building a practice of sharing other people’s information. In Google+, similar to how Twitter used to work, sharing is an important part of the strategy.
For this chapter, the how of sharing is simple. Go to your home page—the little house with the buttons and lines below it—and pick which stream you’d like to read from. Or if you want to see everything, click the word Stream below your avatar on the left side. Then, when you find a post worth sharing, enabled to be shared, simply click the blue Share button beneath the post, and decide which of your circles you’d like to share it with. You can also share a post with the Public overall. Remember: If the original post was shared with a limited audience, then you can share it only with your circles, extended circles, and a limited audience, as well.
Why sharing is important is that people need to see more than your original posts. They need to understand that you’re interested in sharing other people’s information if it