Online Reputation Management: Eliminate the Negative

Writing by Brick Marketing on Sunday, July 6, 2008

A negative review of your business or product is detrimental to your online reputation, but if it is managed correctly you can negate some of its worst impacts. When you find a negative review about your business, under no circumstances should you knee-jerk a reply defending your business. This can quickly devolve into a nasty thread of replies that will in perpetuity online, for anyone to read. You would not want have a heated argument in front of your customers in public, and make no mistake, an online post war is public indeed.

The best way to manage a negative online reputation slur is to take moment to collect yourself and then investigate the situation before your reply.

Your first course of investigating should of course revolve around the facts listed in the negative review.
Was the review about service? If it was, find out when, where, and who, and then interview that employee to understand what happened.
Was the review about a product? If it was, look into the product and the complaint to find out if that particular product had a flaw that caused an issue.

Whether or not you believe the negative review is substantiated, you need to look into the identity of the person who wrote it.

Who is the poster?
Are they connected to competitor?
What is there sphere of online influence?

If the negative review stands, because of a bad employee or a fault in the product, reply back that you have or are addressing the situation, and how. So many negative experiences can be turned into positive ones if the company takes the time to take action.

If the negative review is factually incorrect, ask for a removal or a retraction of the post, and explain why.

Category: local social networking

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3 Comments

Pingback by Online Reputation Defense: Resistance is Futile < Chris Abraham

Made Sunday, 6 of July , 2008 at 4:22 pm

[...] crisis management demands engagement: resistance is futile. Here’s some excellent advice from Local Advertising Journal about the risks and rewards of Online Reputation Management: Eliminate the Negative: A negative [...]

Comment by Dave Ingram

Made Monday, 7 of July , 2008 at 12:18 pm

I’m from Brownbook.net (http://www.brownbook.net) so I have a view that you may be interested in. I TOTALLY agree with what you say above, PLUS I’d add that one negative review doesn’t break your business.

I think we forget that we mustn’t forget that most consumers have sufficient intelligence to exercise a human judgment on reviews shown, if a business has ridiculously flattering reviews from EVERYONE it gets pretty suspect, similarly most of us aren’t turned off by one or two bad reviews if the bulk is good. We know that no-one gets it 100% right every time, and we make allowance for it.

If you use ebay, think how you view the feedback, do you exclusively deal with people with 100% positive feedback, well, that would be nice but 99.9% of people don’t exclude those with less.

It seems that technology companies always try to ‘program’ for every problem, forgetting that us human users can actually make a judgment. What happens in the real world? We listen to other opinions but we don’t just blindly follow them do we. So, YES, managing your reputation online is important, and often it provides great insight into how you can improve your business, but lets not get too carried away with this, and lets recognize that one or two bad reviews will not kill you. Thanks. D>

Comment by Brick Marketing

Made Wednesday, 9 of July , 2008 at 3:59 pm

Thanks, Dave, you bring up a great point. Negative reviews are a part of business and they WILL happen. Most people are smart enough to wiegh the negative comments carefully especially if there are a lot of positives to balance it out.

Negative comments are more hurtful to small businesses simply because there is a fewer comment/review lot to weigh over.

The biggest issue is how the negative is handled once its there.