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Chapter 15 Managing Comments 175

There’s no right or wrong here. Just know that if you enable comments, you will
receive some negative ones. How you respond to those negative comments depends
on your how your company deals with criticism.

Removing Viewer Comments and Responses

One way to deal with negative comments is simply to remove them. All you have to
do is go to the edit page for that video and highlight the comment you want to
remove. This displays a number of new buttons, as shown in Figure 15.6; the one
you’re interested in is the Remove (trashcan) button. Just click the Remove button
and the comment disappears. Voila!

Figure 15.6 Removing an unwanted comment—click the Remove button.

Blocking Specific Viewers from Leaving Comments

Every now and then, you’ll run into a virtual stalker, a disgruntled customer (or
perhaps a competitor) who delights in leaving negative comments on all your
videos. Although you can manually remove all of this user’s comments, a better
approach is to keep him from leaving those comments in the first place.
To this end, YouTube enables you to block individual members from leaving com-
ments and responses (and from flooding your YouTube inbox with negative mes-
sages). To block a user, all you have to do is click that member’s name to access his
channel page, scroll to the information box above the user’s Profile, and click the
Block User link. This blocks the user from commenting on your videos and con-
tacting you.

Tip

You can also block a user directly from the video page. Just click the Block
User button by that user’s comments.

Responding to Negative Comments

Another way to deal with negative comments is to deal with them head on—by
responding directly to the comments. YouTube lets you add your own responses to
any comments left about your videos; this can be a good forum for exchanging
views and opinions with your customer base.