Drive By Reviewers and Online Reputation Terrorists

posted on Mar 08 by Tim Conley in the Online Reputation Management category

Online Reviews Can Be So Inconvenient

I stopped into a convenience store this weekend for a fountain drink (Rooster Booster Lite since you were wondering) and I overheard a guy talking to someone else in his company. I couldn’t help overhearing since he was quite agitated and speaking into a bluetooth earpiece.

He was complaining that he lost a prospect because of a really bad review. Unfortunately, he didn’t say the name of the review site while I was in the area. From what I gather, this review was over a year old (he said this several times) and it is near the top of their reviews. Anyone coming to this site looking at his business is going to see it. And it must be a real kick in the teeth if a prospect would point out that review. Most just wouldn’t contact you if they were turned off by the reviews they saw.

Some reviewers have ‘just cause’ in the reviews they post. Someone in your company falters, could even be you, and the customer doesn’t feel heard so she goes to her favorite review site such as Yelp or Angie’s List and says how horribly she was treated by that so-and-so at your company.

Watch Out For Drive By Reviewers

Then there are times when a customer had a bad experience, and instead of mentioning the bad experience to anyone at your company (people who could actually help fix the situation), he goes to his favorite review site such as your Google business listing and posts a scathing comment about how you and everyone at your company is vile and despicable.

He probably doesn’t have a real beef with you. His experience may not have been that bad. He just likes doing Drive By Reviews. Shooting bad comments as he passes by, you just happened to get in the way.

In a moment, I’ll give you some tips on dealing with bad reviews, but first let’s go into a horror story that has a worse villain than a Drive By Reviewer.

Online Reputation Terrorists

This villain I like to call Osama bin Blogger. OBB for short. OBB can be a man or a woman or even some 13 year old kid in his room with nothing better to do.

OBB doesn’t just hang out in a blog cave in the mountains, oh no, OBB travels to forums, review sites, makes Youtube videos and sometimes does press releases. OBB is on a crusade to destroy the Great Satan (that’s you or your company or both). OBB can’t be satisfied with an apology and a refund. No, OBB wants nothing less than total destruction.

Think I’m being a bit dramatic? It’s actually worse. A friend of mine put on a brilliant event a year ago. I’m going to purposely be vague on some details because I want to bring back the horror for him online. Insert tangent here: search engines are great at connecting relevancy. If I was to put several details into this article, it is possible that Google will connect them with the same details from the tragedy that happened a year ago. I’ll skip the details on how it is possible, but it could then bring back one or more of the online reputation terrorists. Kind of like hitting a hornets nest with a rock. Just not gonna do that to my friend.

Online Reputation Terrorist Cells Do A Lot Of Damage

So this event was insanely awesome and a bit expensive. A percentage of people who attended didn’t have a good experience and some missed out on some of the activities for this multi-day event. Complaints came in and they tried to handle them, but the complaints were just the start. There were many people who jumped into the fray. In time, my friend found out that most of those didn’t have bad experiences, they just liked joining a mob. In reality there was just a small online reputation terrorist cell running the terror campaign.

They had set up their own forums, they commented on other blogs, they sent press releases and eventually, the FTC got involved. Note: the FTC can shut your company down and seize all your assets until you can prove you are innocent. Many business owners are given the opportunity to forfeit their money in exchange for not going to jail or admitting to any wrongdoing. This can be cheaper and easier than trying to prove you didn’t do anything wrong. A lot of business owners don’t know that this kind of shake down can happen in the States. My friend knew it was possible and was really worried about losing his company he had built from nothing.

My friend has a successful company that had over a 20 year history of creating great events with thousands upon thousands of happy customers. Not just happy, but fanatical evangelists for his company. He is also one of the most caring and generous people I have ever met. But if you had read what this terrorist cell was saying about him and his company, you would have thought he was the Great Satan.

And I guess that’s why others started jumping in. People who read a one-sided article started giving their two cents. They weren’t even customers and until that moment had never even heard of the company. Why did they think they had the right to spew venom? Maybe they felt they were helping all those ‘victims’ they just read about.

Many marketers like to talk about things going viral. Their only talking about the positive aspects. Viral, as in virus, can and often does go the other way. My friend’s company did go viral. It looked like this virus could actually kill his company. If you did a search on his type of company a year ago, you would find all sorts of results that mentioned the Great Satan. And if you searched his name or his company’s name, you would have sworn evil incarnate walked the earth.
Eventually, my friend was able to put out the firestorm, but there will be smoldering ashes for years to come. All the bad stuff said about him and his company will exist for as long as the Internet exists. And that online reputation terrorist cell will probably continue looking for any opening to strike at him again. These terrorists, who weren’t going to be appeased by anything less than destruction, cost my friend several million dollars in lost revenue, legal fees and in emergency online reputation management services.

The War on Online Reputation Terror Continues

Since this article is really long, I’m going to put some best practices in dealing with online reviews and online reputation management in part two later this week.

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