Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Response Monitoring That's Military-Friendly

One of my students saw this AP article on military use of social media about the time I saw the one in Marketing Vox. She picked up on the amusing idea of a general using "friend" as a verb--thanks, Beth! My reaction was that I'm delighted when someone does my work for me.


This chart is from the Air Force, and it seems to me to all be right on target. In fact, soon after I first saw it I had a comment on another blog that exactly fit one of their scenarios. Good for the Air Force! And I highly recommend that you copy and save it for your own use.

I'd add one scenario that I've discovered through trial and error. If a commenter makes a comment about something other that the subject of the blog post, it's a good candidate for being ignored. At best, one brief factual response and ignore anything further.

What I realized is that a commenter like this has an agenda and is not likely to be convinced by either fact or sweet reason. The news blogs are full of commenters like this and they can be really annoying. But unless you need to get a fact out, ignore them. They have a short attention span and will soon be looking for someone else to annoy.

Happy monitoring!

3 comments:

Bryan Person said...

Mary Lou:

There's also another option for bloggers who receive completely irrelevant comments to their posts: delete them or (if all posts are held for moderation) don't publish them in the first place!

This is a tactic I usually only employ for spam commenters, but it's certainly well within my right on my blog.

But in many cases, you're quite right: Allow the irrelevant comment to go through and other commenters are likely to just ignore it!

Bryan | @BryanPerson

positdesign said...

I'm slightly more leery and tend to side with io9.com, who posted this flow chart way back in early January; they noted that "there is just something FUBAR about how the Air Force can turn anything into a rigid and overly-complicated flow chart — even the act of chatting informally online."

I posted the link to facebook, at the time calling the chart "awesome and overthought."

MaryLou Roberts said...

Good points, both of you. On the news blog to which I post, the editors would remove comments which violate their policies, so I wasn't considering the spam issue. I get quite a few of those on this blog and delete them.

I think the chart is most useful as a communications device if you are working with a team that shares the monitoring responsibility or with people totally new to monitoring.

Thanks for your insights!