Maybe he didn’t want your company involved in the first place. Maybe he was just having a bad day. Perhaps there was just a cute girl in the room he was trying to impress. (Perhaps you were the cute one)

No matter what you would or could have said, this fella wasn’t having it from moment one. He was lost as soon as someone told him to come to a meeting he didn’t want to go to to discuss a topic he didn’t realize he needed to care about.

In these cases, there is nothing you can do publicly to remedy the situation when it happens. There is also nothing you can do in the next meeting to prepare/mitigate his possible defensive stance.

Clearly he will win any public battle. A quote I always like to remember when faced with stupidity is, “Never argue with an idiot, people around you may not be able to distinguish the difference”

Your only move is to launch a preemptive attack. Have the battle on your turf, on your terms. Get him on the horn and run some initial stats and ideas by him to begin the conversation that you plan to have in the meeting. Let him know how important his opinion is and that you want to assure him that it is your job to make him look good.

Try to get him talking, build rapport, get buddy buddy. At the very least, you will get to know him well enough to prepare some counter strikes for meeting 2 and level the playing field.

Let us know how it works out. I vote for a call or two before the next meeting. Pretty low risk.

Two thoughts come to mind with this:

1) Does he write off eBays buyer/seller rating system? Certainly every person who uses eBay and gives any sort of positive or negative review must be kooky just like these guys on the forum, right?

2) The importance for them to join the conversation is absolutely phenomenal. Now, I have no idea who your client is or what dealing with them is like. But what about a hypothetical situation. It may not work because they may simply not care. But what if someone used their product and didn’t like it. This person is a rather active individual, so they wrote a page about what they didn’t like, why, and how it might be able to be fixed. After they wrote this page, they mailed it to the company directly. What would the company do with that mail? Would they scrap it? If so, I would wonder what hope they have for joining the conversation online, as they’re not evening in it offline.

A tough situation. I look forward to hearing about the results!

The big boys need to see benefits, but in this case I sense it almost might have to be an “aha” moment from them and the trick is to go in with a strategy to make that come about.

I absolutely agree with you. I think we are going int he same direction. I think my emphasis is that I really want my clients to start realizing how important it is to get involved with the conversations that are happening online.

Thanks for your thoughts.

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said in terms of a client need to listen, learn and communicate with a client.

And maybe I didn’t express myself clearly before, I think where we’re disconnecting is that as I read this, it sounds like you presented this as a challenge to overcome and a crisis to be managed because people are making negative comments. And if you use that kind of language, you’re naturally going to put people on the defensive.

I might have tried to position it as a tool that’s not being utilized and an opportunity for growth. And if you could show some folks out there making positive comments, then those could serve as examples of how the client themselves could actively use this tool.

In the end, I think we both see the same end goal (a client that actively engages and interacts with it’s customers to learn), we’re just taking different routes.

I don’t agree that they need to support anyone. They should not need to have someone else fight their battles or stand up for them. They should be leading this charge and learning and reacting based on what they hear and read.

My thoughts. As always, thank you for yours.

Once disarmed, you could probably bring him to be more open to your suggestions.

That or bring bananas to the next meeting and kindly offer him one once he’s done thumping his chest.