Tampa Is…?

My buddy Josh Hallett asked Visit Florida what they were gonna do when those inevitable negative comments showed up on the user-submitted state getaways.

You can almost hear the sigh and see the rolling of the eyes when he did finally get a response from the PR department:

“If you did not see negative comments on the site, it is because we either did not get any, or they are not being posted. The reasons why should be obvious.”

To folks who understand social media, the reasons are not obvious. PR is changing, and unfortunately some PR professionals are not changing with it. There is no person, place or thing that is perfect. Furthermore, everyone KNOWS that.

Getting your website visitors to see both the positive AND negative comments allow those readers to feel that they can make an informed decision. If there are only positive comments, people quickly realize that they are being snowed. Part of the open honesty of conversational media is accepting negative remarks. Part of public relations should be to improve those negatives, not delete them and pretend they don’t exist.