Bad Online Review? How To Respond To Keyboard Critics
There are more and more venues on the internet for people to say what they want about your company. And there’s probably not much you can do about it.
The first rule of thumb, said Laura Briere of Vision Advertising in Worcester, is not to give anyone a reason to write anything negative.
But no company does things right all the time, so Briere helps her clients stick to a following strategy.
“If you screw up, make it right,” Briere said. “If you get a good review, you want to thank people.”
If a customer writes something negative on your company’s Facebook page, never remove the comment. And never respond angrily.
Instead, Briere said, apologize, listen to any further feedback the customer might have, and perhaps offer something to make it right.
When a company responds gracefully, Briere said, the point isn’t to reach the aggrieved customer, but to show the hundreds of others who might read the interaction the type of company you run.
“It diffuses the situation, it makes you look like a hero because you didn’t shut that person down, it shows how you handle conflict and it shows you care about your customers,” she said. ”Social media is just an extension of the human experience. It’s not a marketing tool — it’s a vehicle to communicate with people.”
High-customer-volume businesses like hotels and restaurants tend to get the bulk of online reviews, but Briere said even she found a nasty comment about her marketing firm once on Yelp.com, a major online review site. The commenter wrote that he or she was from South Boston, where Briere said she had never had a customer. The comment said Briere was a bad listener who didn’t do what the person had asked for. She suspects it was a competitor posing as a former customer.
“It’s crazy. The funny thing about Yelp and things like that is you have no control over what people say at all,” she said.
Briere’s solution was to wait it out. Yelp eventually filters out reviews from one-time reviewers, which can be good and bad, because good reviews from one-timers can also disappear eventually.
Legal Perspective
John McInnes, an attorney at Mirick O’Connell in Worcester, represented an online reviewer during the past year. A company was reviewed negatively by his client and sent a cease-and-desist letter.
McInnes responded by asking the company’s attorney to identify what part of the review was false or defamatory. The matter ended quickly.
“Ultimately, they were upset with a negative review,” McInnes said. “They hoped for a retraction and didn’t get one.”
If a business finds it has a negative review online, the litmus test is to determine whether the comment is defamatory or demonstrably false, McInnes said. An example of defamation would be if an online commenter accused a business of committing a criminal act. A court could order a web host to remove such content, he said.
What’s Not Defamation?
Opinions are protected speech and anything written that can be shown to be true cannot be defamation.
“A big part of it is the First Amendment and figuring out what is opinion versus what is defamation,” McInnes said. “If something is false, was it a mistake, or was it malicious?”
Attorneys can try to subpoena an Internet service provider for the identifying information of the commenter to pursue court action, but in McInnes’ experience, some websites are reluctant to do so because they could develop a reputation that could cost them web traffic.
He said it can be difficult, and costly, to pursue court action in most cases.
Usually, the best course of action when something negative is posted online — whether true or not — is to battle it with search engine optimization strategies, he said.
“What most companies are doing now is playing the game, if you will,” he said. “They put out their own marketing material that will hit higher up on the search page than the bad stuff.”
WBJ Web Partners
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