In the post Responding to an Online Critic: Get your Timing, Target, and Tone Right , Shabbir Imber Safdar and Jason Alcorn discuss their opinions on whether or not to respond to bloggers who are critical of your company or products. They claim that by giving visibility to little known bloggers and naysayers-by responding to them at all or by linking to their posts in your response-you are providing the blogger unwarranted visibility and credibility. They lambast Richard Edelman for not only the outpoken way he challenged Jason Calacanis’ assessment of PR as unnecessary, but for the mere fact that he addressed this criticism at all. They suggest Edelman should have simply let the issue lie, where it would wither and die on the proverbial vine of old news.

In contrast to this, the popular marketing webzine Marketing Sherpa published an article titled How to Practice Defensive Branding: 6 Key Factors to Build Credibility, Swat Bad Buzz which articulates their point of view on how and when companies should respond to online criticism. Their’s is a much more proactive approach, suggesting that brands mitigate the risk of landing the role of online punching bag by:

• Building trust
• Ensuring company behaviors match espoused values (like buying green power if you say you’re a green company)
• Being authentic and transparent
• Listening and responding

This issue also rose its head at the Blogworld Conference I attended and spoke at a couple weeks ago. In one of the panels featuring my fellow Intel colleague (and Conversations Matter founder) Michael Brito, Ted Murphy of Izea asked whether corporate brands had policies to respond to critics who throw arrows at the brand in their blogs or on discussion threads. Valuable questions were raised on whether a corporate brand should respond to what traditional media might consider “small-time bloggers” or employ the “ignore them and they’ll go away” approach.

I can tell you that this issue is hotly debated within the walls here at Intel. There are often good reasons why company employees cannot comment on certain topics or threads, for instance if the topic discusses an issue that is currently under litigation. And yes, there are also times when it is best not to feed the trolls [I got that phrase from my friend and co-founder of Slashdot Jeff Bates] under the bridge who seem to make it their lifelong purpose to discredit certain companies through their vitriolic diatribes of negativity.

For the most part, however, I believe that all criticism is generally good criticism if used by companies correctly. And in the online world, where all content typically lives on infinitum, today’s small-time blog may just become tomorrow’s Huffington Post. Ignore it at your own risk. In addition-and pay attention because this is the nugget here-companies who respond to detractors by showing that they listen, respond, and take action based on customer feedback are likely to win them over as some of their most adoring fans. This has happened time and again, most recently on Intel’s IT Community site where community manager Josh Hilliker won over a naysayer by engaging with him and responding to his criticism. That blogger now blogs for Intel on that site and drives traffic to the community from his own blog.

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