Negative Results Course: Dealing With Forums
Script from the lesson The Negative Results Course
Jason Barnard speaking: Dealing with problematic forum threads. What’s the situation? There’s a forum thread from a third-party site on your Brand SERP and it looks negative. The first thing to bear in mind is that even though you don’t agree and you think this is unfair, remember that forum threads are all about opinions and people are free to express their opinions.
Jason Barnard speaking: We all have a tendency to focus on positive opinions about us and we tend to ignore negative opinions when we can. In this case, when you’ve got this forum thread ranking very high on your Brand SERP, you can’t afford to ignore it. In this lesson, I’ll look at how best to deal with it and reduce the damage it’s doing on the short term.
Jason Barnard speaking: Longer term, you definitely want to DRAM it. Watch the Leapfrogging lessons for more on how to do that. It’s important to bear in mind that behind every comment is a person. Behind the negative comments we are dealing with is a person with a bad experience with your brand. They’ve written on a forum because they’re angry and upset, something in your service or product didn’t live up to their expectations.
Jason Barnard speaking: They’re unhappy with what you’ve provided and their opinion is valid. You might not agree, but it’s still a valid opinion. The problem that you need to face up to is that once one person with a negative opinion creates a forum thread, it can spiral quickly out of control. And the more people contribute to that thread, the higher it will rank on your Brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: It sounds facile, but keeping customers happy has to be one of the foundations of any long-term business strategy. The visible side of satisfying clients and keeping them happy is great reviews. The invisible side is avoiding bad feedback of all sorts on social media, in reviews, but also negative forum threads.
Jason Barnard speaking: There will always be some negative forum threads about a brand. Why did they sometimes appear on Brand SERPs? One reason is that they’re fresh. Another is popularity. Both of those make the thread relevant for searches on your brand name. Once a thread gets popular, people contribute with new comments and once a forum thread starts getting updated regularly, that makes it fresh and it gets visibility on the platform and on Google and that means more people see it and contribute, and that makes it fresh and popular.
Jason Barnard speaking: It’s a spiraling cycle. And Google sees this as a signal that the thread is relevant and important, and therefore a great candidate for ranking on your Brand SERP. Once up on your Brand SERP, an active thread is very difficult to push down. Worse, a thread starts with one single person who’s angry, but negativity attracts negativity. Lots of people will jump on the bandwagon and few people will spontaneously defend you. And even if they do, the sentiment they express is highly unlikely to be as strong as the negative opinions. A thread that starts badly usually gets worse.
Jason Barnard speaking: So what can you do? First is to minimize the damage and second is to push it off the SERP. In this lesson, I’ll explain how to minimize the immediate on SERP damage. For the mid to long-term, you really want to push it down off the SERP. So watch the leapfrogging lessons for more about how to do that.
Jason Barnard speaking: First thing to do is to open communication with the people on the thread. You need to engage with these people and start the process of calming things down. That usually means introducing some context and a little perspective. Do that by replying to the initial post. Be tactful though, the person isn’t wrong, they’re simply not telling the whole story.
Jason Barnard speaking: Tactfully indicating that the situation isn’t quite so black and white as they make out is a great way to calm the thread down and helpfully replying to the initial post shows that you’re open to discuss and that you want to resolve the problem. That’s a good signal to the community and to Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, don’t argue your point of view. Don’t complain and justify yourself in public. Most of all, don’t criticize the person directly. You already seem to be the bad guy here, so don’t argue the point. If they were angry to start with that’s nothing compared to how angry they will get if you start a fight in public. Stay reasonable, offer solutions and avoid criticizing, however much they might criticize you. That’s the best way to calm things down.
Jason Barnard speaking: Try to take this negative dialogue off the thread. Offer to engage through email or by phone. Engaging with people on the forum runs the risk of making things a lot worse. The initial part of your dialogue is probably going to be quite negative. If possible, it’s better to keep that negative conversation private and definitely off the forum thread. If you can, bring them back onto the forum when you’ve calm things down and they’re in a more positive frame of mind.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, reply to the other comments, both negative and positive. Engage with everyone in the conversation. Move any negative conversations away from public view and push the conversation back onto the thread once the tone is positive.
Jason Barnard speaking: There are several things you want to bear in mind here. Number one, people have vented anger and they aren’t necessarily interested in engaging with you. Number two, you don’t need everyone to be overly positive and sing you praises, that would seem suspicious. Your aim is to get them to give a more balanced view. Number three, the process is step-by-step, comment-by-comment, person-by-person.
Jason Barnard speaking: Remember that every contributor is a person and some of them have valid complaints about your products and services that you need to deal with.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number four, it takes time. You can’t change the tone of a thread with just one comment. Each time you reply, each time you can get one contributor to calm down, the tone of the thread changes for the better. Over time, that becomes noticeable both to the audience and to Google. If you can’t calm things down, even by being super tactful, if these people are so angry and upset that they can no longer even start to contemplate your point of view, then you need to stop. You really don’t want to poke a wasp’s nest. They’ll get more angry and their comments will become even more vitriolic and damaging. Plus, you’re just keeping the content fresh and that result will become even more sticky on your Brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: The next option is to ask the forum owner to help. Getting the thread changed by the person who truly controls it is by far the best option, but it’s also very difficult. The key here is building a relationship with the forum owner. Without any relationship, you have no chance. With a relationship, you might be able to convince them to improve things.
Jason Barnard speaking: I’ve seen site owners help brands right off the bat when the threat is obviously excessive or unfair, but more often than not, you need to build up some kind of relationship with the owner and get them on your side and then convince them that this thread is bad for them. They have to see that intervening is beneficial to them. It’s in their interest. We’ll look at that later on in this lesson.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, what can we realistically ask them to change? The most important thing is to get them to change the meta title and description since that’s what’s most visible on your Brand SERP. You can’t really ask them to misrepresent the thread, but you can reasonably ask them to change it to be a more balanced reflection of the tone of the thread.
And that works particularly well when you’ve done your work on the thread that I explained earlier. The thread will now give a more balanced opinion of your brand and your products than the initial post, and that’s the key. More often than not, the metas are taken from the initial post. That’s rarely an accurate representation once you’ve calmed things down and other people have added their thoughts to the forum thread. Surprisingly, forum owners are actually open to this idea. The role of their site is to show a representative community based view. So a more balanced metas make absolute sense to them. In this case, we’ve got them to change the meta title and description to make them less aggressive.
Jason Barnard speaking: We’ve created a slight problem because there’s been an update on the page and that makes the content fresh, but changing the metas is a big short-term win. It’s no longer absolutely killing our Brand SERP. One thing that tends to stick around is the URL. It’s usually the title of the initial comment and if that’s negative, even if you get the title and description changed, the negative message is still visible on your SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Ask to have that changed, but bear in mind this is a really big ask. Changing the URL requires some technical implementation on their part and that’s usually too much to ask. I mentioned making this beneficial to the site owner, so as you just saw, if you approach this well, you can reasonably ask the owner to change the presentation on the SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: You can also try to get them to remove the worst content, but you need to approach it from their point of view. They need to clearly see some benefit that serves their self interest. Bear in mind that this is a long way from being a priority for them. They have thousands, possibly millions of threads to deal with.
Jason Barnard speaking: They’re not going to be instinctively enthusiastic about this one single thread. You have to make it important to them. Also, don’t demand changes or bully, however much you think you’re in the right, this won’t work. Be empathetic and look at this from the site owners point of view, and don’t call the lawyers, watch the lesson
about Tactics to Avoid and Mistakes not to Make in the Fundamentals course to understand why that is a spectacularly bad idea.
Jason Barnard speaking: Any positive changes you can get are well worth taking. You’re in a weak position here. Getting the meta title and description change is obviously the aim of the game, but anything that makes this thread less poisonous will reduce its capacity to rank on your Brand SERP, and every negative mention you can have removed is very good for your business.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, even if you can’t get the metas changed and make your SERP look better, it’s well worth removing individual comments. That’s because beyond your Brand SERP, these threads affect your business. People see them, your reputation in their eyes suffers every time someone adds a negative comment to a thread like this, but also Google sees them and Google uses your reputation as part of its ranking algorithm.
Jason Barnard speaking: Here’s some possible angles you can consider when approaching a site owner.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number one, prove that it’s a truly unfair representation. This one is tough. You can see it’s unfair, but anyone who doesn’t know your company as well as you do, won’t see it. You have to prove that this is unfair from a completely impartial view point. If you’re to have any hope, you must take a big step back and look at your brand and your products and your services with complete impartiality. That’s possible, but very hard to do. I would suggest getting some outside help.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number two, show the site owner that it’s black hat or spam. Forum owners don’t want black hat or spam on their sites. This is an ongoing and very annoying fight for them. If you can demonstrate that you’re helping them reduce abuse on their platform, they’ll be very receptive.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number three, bad language. Few people want bad language on their site. Comments that include bad language, often excessive and a great candidates for complete removal. That’s the best case for you, but they might put asterisks in the place of the root word. Even that is worth taking.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number four, excessive. If someone is going too far and being vindictive, it’s actually quite common and easy to spot. Vindictive people keep adding to the thread without any reason. Point that out to the site, owner.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number five, false claims. If a comment is provably false, it’s a good candidate for removal. Once again, you need to take a big step back and be neutral in order to argue a case like this.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number six, if the person is not really a client, you can potentially get the forum owner to remove it. Hard to prove, but if you are sure about it, then it’s worth a try.
Number seven, negative SEO. If you can prove it, this is a no-brainer for the site owner. Nobody wants to be used as a platform for negative SEO. It’s very damaging for their global SEO strategy, and they’ll be happy to remove it. Always bear in mind that they truly don’t care that it’s damaging for you, put yourself in their shoes and explain it to them from their point of view, demonstrate that it’s damaging for them.
Jason Barnard speaking: If they do help you, the result will start to look a little bit better short term, but whatever the outcome of your exchanges with the forum owner, you definitely want to push this result of the first page of your Brand SERP. So, whilst you’re talking to the forum owner, work on drowning the thread using the leapfrog techniques that I explained in this course.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.
