When I give presentations about social media, a frequent question is, “What can we do when we see someone kicking up a fuss online?” I assure them that it is identical to any other customer service complaint. Most people with a beef want the problem fixed, but they also — short of that — want to be heard. Really heard.

Further evidence comes from iStrategyLabs’ post about monitoring positive and negative comments. They write the following:

We’ve found that 80% of the time we can easily turn a brand terrorist into a brand evangelist just by letting them know that they’ve been heard, or by directing them to a resource they’re looking for (you could call this customer service).

The other 15% of the time we need to talk internally with our team to see what can be done with more complex issues and the last 5% ends up being something client side teams need to handle directly (i.e. reaching out from senior leadership, or product features need to be changed etc.).

It’s a good post, and further validation for a technique that I’ve seen used countless times to good results. Here, by the way, is how iStrategyLabs measures share-of-voice, both for positive and negative comments: