Most companies have at least one skeleton in the closet when it comes to negative comments online. An unsatisfied customer, who may or may not be justified in their opinion, is more than happy to post negative comments online as a form of retaliation. The negative comments might not even be from a customer- the source might be a competitor making false accusations, an ex employee or someone who just doesn't like your industry. While you can't control what others say about your company (these comments will occur whether your company uses social media marketing or not), you can do damage control. Here is a five step process for addressing negative comments online:

1. Address the negative comment as quickly as possible. There are dozens of free brand monitoring tools and paid brand monitoring tools for finding negative comments online in real time or as a daily update. I recommend trying to address negative comments within 24 hours or less- every moment you wait to address a negative comment, someone else might be reading it.

2. Resist the urge to attack the negative commenter. While you instinctively want to lash out at someone who has said something about your company that might not be true or is incorrect, that is the wrong way to react because you are further provoking this person. Respond in a cool, collected and professional manner. Read your response objectively before making it public, and if you're unable to do that ask a friend for advice.

3. Apologize if necessary. If you've upset a customer, apologize and respond with some sort of consolation package (one month free hosting, 25% discount, free pizza, etc.). Even if you think the customer is wrong, your prospects don't know that. Apologize, even if you can't muster up more than "I'm sorry this partnership didn't work out." This situation obviously doesn't apply if the negative comment isn't coming from a customer.

4. Explain the situation calmly, without attacking the negative commenter. We recently had our first tweet on our @AquaBlueWeb account- someone, without clicking on a link, warned other users that our link would contain a virus because it was regarding Google Wave. The link actually went to an article on Mashable.com, a reputable online news source. We responded publicly to the commenter and explained that the link went to Mashable.com, and he promptly removed his negative tweet.

By explaining your situation rather than attacking a negative commenter, they often remove the negative comment, apologize, or respectfully agree to disagree with you. This looks much better than having an unanswered negative comment floating around the internet.

5. Bury the evidence. While you can't usually remove a negative twitter post, blog rant or rip-off report, you can usually bury the search results if you're backed by a good SEO or social media marketing expert. Did someone mention your @twittername in a negative tweet? When this happens to a client and we can't get the negative tweet removed, we simply get RTed (retweeted) on good posts so the negative result disappears. When we find a negative page online, we bury it to page three of search results with positive pages so that it is difficult to find.