Reflection on Social Media Case 5: Paypal Deleted Comments

The PayPal story is very interesting to me and something that I have never heard of. PayPal posted on their Facebook page about being featured on Forbes and started to receive a lot of negative comments. PayPal then began to delete all of the negative comments which to me is very unusual. Usually companies who do something like this leave the negative comments because it is used as constructive criticism to know what they need to improve on and get better at. The deleting of the comments then began to upset the people because they felt like they could no longer voice their opinion and that it had been taken away. This only fueled the fire for the people as they only began to comment negative things about PayPal. This instance only hurt them because it made others not trust them anymore and it seemed very skeptical. I really didn’t understand all the madness behind the deleted comments because no matter what you do you can’t ever make everyone happy. Therefore, I feel they should have left the negative comments so that they could improve and fix what the people were complaining about. In the link attached it states reasons as to why customer reviews are good for business https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-business/consumer-laws/customer-service/managing-customer-reviews/benefits. In my opinion, the only time I feel that it is acceptable to delete comments on your reviews is if there are completely off topic and have nothing to do with the business or if there are vulgar words. In the article attached by Lisa Barone she states 5 reasons why NOT to delete negative comments, https://outspokenmedia.com/reputation-management/5-reasons-not-to-delete-negative-reviews/. This incident with PayPal did take place in 2011 so I think that they have learned from their mistakes because they are very successful today. I understand at the time they were thinking if they only had positive comments in their review it would make them look better. At the end of the day every business has to do what the customers want them to, to keep them happy otherwise they won’t have any business.