Drive By Reviews & Online Reputation Terrorists Part 2

posted on Mar 15 by Tim Conley in the Online Reputation Management category

To break things up, I decided to ask for input from fellow LinkedIn users (part of my LinkedIn Experiment) on how to deal with bad reviews and negative search engine results. To give credit for these excellent comments, I have linked to authors’ LinkedIn profiles. In no particular order, here are some of the responses I got:

Q: Do you have any Best Practices for dealing with negative online reviews or negative search engine results?

A: I feel the best way to handle negative reviews is to address them immediately and honestly. Acknowledge the problem and the customer’s feelings. Offer additional insight (your side) in a respectful manner, and a solution or next action step for resolution. Thank them for their input.
Becca Slaton

A: I’ve built minisites for clients that have done the trick, of course I’ve registered many social media profiles and have built links to them to push down negative results too.

One thing which has been successful recently has been to utilize social media monitoring tools to respond quickly to negative opinions coming from influential sources. In all cases, directly contacting the person and “making it right” has always resulted in a removed review or post.
Nicholas Herinckx

A: Negative Reviews:

I agree with the previous posters that addressing the issue ONLINE is the way to show potential clients you care what they have to say. The tone of your communication is key when addressing these issues, always have a few people outside of your business look over the response prior to posting it.

Negative Search Results:

The best way to address this from a brand perspective is to make use of social media profiles. For example a business could rank in the first position for a brand related search followed by a negative review. by simply filling out a Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter & a few others you can push that negative review onto the second page of results. And the side effect is more exposure for your business, not to bad.
Chris Gauron

A: I’ve recently dealt with a competitor posting negative online reviews for a client of mine in Google Maps.

For online reviews – yelp, citysearch, etc, keep it short, simple and professional. Apologize for the experience they had and ask them to contact you directly (as owner or manager) to resolve the situation as you are committed to customer experience. Whatever you do, do NOT get into back/forth banter as tempting as it can be.

Most people realize that there will be some people you can NEVER make happy. (Another client was a restaurant that got a 1star review because the patron’s GPS gave her wrong directions.) But if you have a pattern, it’s certainly something to pay attention to.

I had my client do a campaign to get happy customers post reviews directly on that site to ‘dilute’ the negative review. Instead of a flurry of reviews in a short time, I encouraged to have the reviews posted consistently (rather than 15 in one day – it looks questionable)

I generally encourage my clients to have a system to encourage quality online testimonials so that a stray negative review won’t require damage control of catastrophic proportions. It’s easier to do it proactively than reactively.

Reactively, I also encourage having alerts set up for the business name and competitors so that you’ll be able to respond quickly to an ‘opportunity’.
Leslie-Anne McAllister

A: This question has a ton of great answers already. I do want to jump in and contribute that these negative mentions or search engine results are often an opportunity to prove yourself, and the first step is often reaching out and asking how you can help. We deal more with the social space, but a lot of the same theories/best practices apply to sites like Yelp!.

I’ve linked a blog post my fellow Community Manager wrote on the subject in case it’s useful. http://www.radian6.com/blog/2009/10/what-is-the-best-way-to-handle-negative-comments/
Katie Morse
Those were some great responses and I hope you, dear reader, will make good use of such golden advice.

PS. I would also like to thank the following for their answers on LinkedIn. Their answers were just as good as the above, but I couldn’t include all of them without this post being very long.

Hugh Macken, Jr.
Brian Olson
Eric Seymour
Peggy Schoen
Varad Kamini
Melih Oztalay

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.