This is a guest post by Heather von Doehren, Assistant Editor at Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression
Scott Sweeney’s previous article on How to Handle A Reputation Hit caused me to reflect on how we at Relief handle not only a hit to one’s blogging reputation, but how to handle negative feedback from loyal readers.
Most successful bloggers will give you the advice to really listen to your readers when they have comments, feedback, or criticism. And it’s good sound advice, as not listening to feedback/criticism is the first step to losing anyone’s respect, let alone website traffic. But what happens when your readers are just flat out…well…wrong?
I’m not referring to the kind of “wrong” that you feel when you are hurt from negative feedback (can you say denial?) …I’m referring to commentary that runs counter to the very niche that you’ve built for yourself in the blogosphere. One such occurrence happened to us at Relief.
Now, if you are unfamiliar with the purpose of Relief, we are a Christian print journal publishing fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction with a spiritual slant; however, we’re not your typical “safe-for-the-whole-family” Christians. We’re looking for work that isn’t sheltered, fluffy, or preachy. We sell our journal as being “edgy” in that we don’t censor our authors. So, in essence…anything goes. At our website, (our blog specifically) we attempt to build this persona as well as act as a resource for writers striving to write/represent Christianity as it stands in the real world, not the fabricated ideal one that you’ll find stacked in a typical Christian bookstore.
As you can imagine, blogging in such a strange, narrowly-focused, and controversial niche has placed us in a difficult position. Some conservative Christians judge us because we’re too “morally loose” and some nonreligious folk hate us because we’re too preachy. Needless to say we get some hate mail, which is to be expected.
What surprised us though was to find an atheist website that criticized us for not being more biblical, attacking our reputation not just as a Christian literary journal, but as Christians. And following the advice of many, we decided to counter that attack by running a blog series centered around studying scripture, something that our website had yet to really dedicate itself to doing. All in all, the criticism was valid in that by shear omission of the topic, we had left it open for attack. So something had to be done.
We enlisted some bloggers to help with this and quickly posted two blogs on reading the Bible, as this is what we perceived needed to be done in order to “fix” our problem. But to our surprise, we received more negative feedback from that move than anything else we had ever done.
I thought about ignoring the criticism, thinking that it was just impossible to make everyone happy. But when I received an email from a loyal Christian reader titled, “WTF Relief? So Much for Edgy” I knew I had to do something.
1. Confront the Criticism Privately If You Feel It Was Wrong
Since ignoring a reader’s feedback is the first step to losing that reader, confront it privately first. Send that person an email explaining your reasoning/rationale. More often than not, a lot of criticism stems from a misunderstanding, and opening the door for communication is the first step in seeing eye to eye.
2. Make Your Readers Aware of the Situation
If the negative feedback comes from more than one person and you still feel it’s out-of-line, write a blog addressing the issues ASAP. A good, successful blog is more than just one person standing on a soapbox writing about whatever pops into his/her head. It’s a community of people who share similar interests and goals of which you are the mediator. If your children aren’t playing nicely, put them in time-out by writing a blog that confronts the issues at hand. Speak to them and with them. They’ll listen.
3. Ask for help
I’ve experienced a strange phenomenon among some of our readers. Sometimes they forget that there’s a person at the other end of the computer screen who’s just as fallible as they are. Asking your readers for advice will not only remind them that occasionally we need help too, but motivate them to be more active members of the community you’ve worked so hard to build.
After posting our reply about our negative feedback, we received not only the highest traffic day ever, but so much positive feedback from readers who had previously been very passive members of our blog.
If you follow all the above advice and you still receive the same negative commentary, then it’s time to either start considering taking the feedback and making some real changes, or…it’s time to get ready and kick some reader ass butt.
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