After my post regarding how to respond to critics, I felt it was necessary to clarify a slightly muddied point. One of the things I mentioned was that if you’re being criticized unfairly or the criticism is baseless, you shouldn’t even bother responding to it. I still stand by that statement but I think the qualifier needs some explanation.
If you’ve been blogging for any amount of time, you’ve experienced some harsh criticism. There’s no escaping that. Of that harsh criticism though, some will mindless rants brought on by trolls to please themselves. These are normally recognized by the over the top statements that they make, rarely containing facts. They also tend to use profanity and have a challenging time with rules of grammar. This kind of criticism can usually be ignored without consequence. The troll may return a few times, but with nothing to seed their insults, they often leave. The other major type of criticism usually requires an entirely different approach.
As much as we’d like to think that we’ll only be criticized by mean people who just want to get a reaction from us, that’s not always the case. Sometimes we’re hit with very sharp, pointed criticisms that are very factual. Those can hurt. Badly. But toss that aside for the moment. These criticisms normally can’t be ignored. Assuming that they’re not picking on personal character traits that are difficult to alter, but rather on elements of your business, website or business model, it’s time to perk your ears up and take notice.
You must find a way to respond to these criticisms in a sensible manner. For example if you’re talking about criticisms regarding the safety of a product you sell, you have to respond right away. You response may be that you will no longer be selling these items, you will recall them, you will replace them for people, etc… That’s just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. The quicker and more decisively you respond to these types of issues, the less likely you will be to suffer brand damage. Case in point, Iams vs Firestone. Iams recalled ridiculous amounts of pet food once they found out what was going on (how much they knew when can be debated). By contrast Firestone denied and denied that their tires were defective up until evidence was so overwhelming that they could hide no longer (who knows, they might still think it’s not their fault). Firestone was therefore picked over and dragged through the mud every time anything happened with one of their tires. Iams didn’t get through this unscathed, but their comparatively decisive action stemmed the problem and that went a long way towards maintaining a significant portion of their customer base.
These two examples are merely brought to illustrate the point of why it’s important to respond appropriately to fact based criticisms. Hopefully any similar situation you encounter won’t be anywhere near as dire 
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