One of the hard-learned tricks in blogging is learning when to respond to negative feedback from the community.
Jeff Hunter, who writes Talentism and now is working on the SimplyHired blog, demonstrates one way how to deftly handle criticism.
First, my thoughts: Joel Cheesman writes a Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down post about the reemergence of Simply Hired as an active blogger. I'm a little confused as to the Thumbs down part, which is to say that they should have done it earlier, and Recruiting.com shouldn't be cheering them on for now getting it right. Was that a slap at Recruiting.com?
I'll remember that the next time he launches the seventeenth version of a Cheez-based marketing strategy (go on, click it). It's a positive thing that Simply Hired turned to a professional blogger, and where did these random links to TalentZoo and College Recruiter come in? I've linked those two sites from Recruiting.com quite a bit in the last year, but if I remember, Joel stopped reading the site because there was too much clutter. Maybe he missed that.
But I guess there shouldn't be too many hard feelings - Joel is following the long-honored blogger tradition of asserting superiority by handing down judgement on others. If that last line came out as rude, I want to apologize but my browser screen is covered with this orange dust that seems to be tracked in from all over the Recruiting Blogosphere. It was tasty at first, but now it just seems to be everywhere.
Enough of that - let's focus on what Jeff did right in his response, rather than on my admittedly poor joke telling.
Jeff's non-response to Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down: subtitled, But Brutus is an honorable man.
1) Praise the other blogger for their wisdom.
2) Be humble
3) Poke fun at yourself
4) Praise the other blogger effusively
5) Be funny - throw in pop culture references
Most of all - no matter what - don't blog angry. Letting out your anger is a sign that the other blogger is getting to you, and weakness to bloggers is like showing weakness to dogs, or wolves, or thugs (I'm never sure which).
In the end, there's only one entity to blame. And that's Canada.
