Online Comment Boards: Learn to Swim Before Jumping in the Water

[By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications]

The first of two parts on how best to deal with online comments. Today: How to be prepared. Next: How to get involved.

John Kroll has some advice about news story online comments for folks in charge of their organizations’ reputations: Know the water before you jump in, because it could be a gator-filled swamp.

The comment boards attached to virtually every news, sports, business and feature story that appears online are one of the most dramatic developments of the digital journalism revolution.

The comment boards: allow readers direct access to the journalists; lead to better stories as readers ask questions, point out mistakes or highlight logical holes in stories; give readers a voice they’d never had.

The comment boards also: allow racist, vile commenters to hide behind anonymity; lead to reputations being unfairly damaged; give trolls a free pass to practice their dark arts.

Kroll knows all that – and more intimately than just about anyone you’ll meet. For years as a Plain Dealer staffer, Kroll was the Online Editor, focused on cleveland.com. Moderating the online comments and interacting with commenters was a specialty. For about three years, I worked with Kroll at The Plain Dealer. He now teaches at Kent State University when not writing his blog about online journalism advice and opinion.

Kroll offers a game plan on how people charged with protecting their organizations’ reputations should approach the comment boards:

• Know the territory before entering.
• Know who to work with at that online outlet for the most serious problems.
• Get involved and set the record straight about your organization – calmly and professionally.
• Use your own online and social media tools to fight back.

Let’s take a deeper dive, in two parts, starting with what you should do before the comments start.

Prepare for the crisis before the crisis

Just as you prepare a crisis management plan before the crisis, Kroll urges people to educate themselves about the local news sites or any sites that are likely to write about your organization before that story with the problematic comments appears.

That begins with knowing the websites’ policies or guideline on comments. Most have them, including cleveland.com. And most are like cleveland.com’s. No obscenities. No personal attacks. No hate speech. Commenters on a particular story should be commenting about that story and the issues in it.

Then, Kroll advises, learn by reading the comments. Now that you know the rules, are rules-breakers getting away with it? Does it look like the site is being moderated? One way to tell is if the commenters themselves are complaining about comments being removed. That can be a positive sign that an active moderator is in place.

In extreme cases, comment boards may be free-for-alls, with no apparent rules, no moderation – and little hope you can effectively make any impression with your sober, reasoned response.

“I like to say,” says Kroll, “if it’s a swamp, you don’t want to go in there no matter what, because you’ll just be closer to the alligators.”

When it gets really serious, get serious help

To deal with a potential crisis in online comments, be prepared by knowing who to deal with.

What if the online comments about your organization or you include serious factual errors that could affect your sales or stock price?

“You want to get to somebody on that site as quickly as possible,” Kroll says.

And that goes back to planning. Does your crisis management plan include updated contact information for local or likely media contacts – especially the people responsible for the online content? The websites don’t necessarily make it easy – try going to one now and figuring out who to contact in an emergency. The titles can be unfamiliar. But look for titles like Online Editor, Director of Digital Operations or Director of Community Engagement. Learn who they are. Find out how to contact them in a crisis. And include that information in your crisis management plan.

They will want to know if such a serious error is on their site. And they will almost certainly help.

Thom Fladung is a vice president for Hennes Communications and a 33-year veteran of newspapers.

Photo Credit:  Tambako the Jaguar (Creative Commons License)