Our last blog post discussed the importance of Facebook in launching Garden*Hood, an independent garden center in Atlanta, GA. Indeed, Garden*Hood boasted 400 Facebook fans before the garden center ever opened its doors.
In a recent article in Lawn & Garden Retailer, store manager Kacey Cloues shared some wisdom about how to handle unhappy Facebook posts from customers. Her advice: steer the conversation in a more positive direction, just as you would in person.
For instance, last summer, during a serious drought, complaints about dying plants and high watering bills started to gain traction on Garden*Hood’s Facebook page. The garden center turned things around by asking people to post reports of the plants that were doing well under these tough conditions – what plants were surviving, where they were situated, how long they had been there, what care they’d been given. Note that the specific questions lead to a conversation, instead of a simple list of drought-tolerant plants.
Cloues reports, We wanted to empower our community to salvage something useful from this tough situation. We wanted people to recognize that one summer of drought didn’t make them poor gardeners. It just meant that we all needed to pool our knowledge to learn what worked and what didn’t and make plans for how to handle similar conditions in the future.
What a brilliant turn-around!
