Media in the New Millennium

posted by Doyle

A gym here in Denver got a pretty good beat-down on Yelp recently. The problem? Posts that were pretty clearly fakes (I have to do say I don’t know for sure if they were or not). The Yelp community took some pretty strong offense. The biggest tip? The business got their first review of any kind and within just a couple of days had a number of five-star, “this is the best gym EVER” reviews. (I’d link, but the site has been cleaned up, and there’s just a couple of reviews out there — the accusatory comments are gone.)

If they weren’t fake, they sure looked it.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with asking your customers to review your business on sites like Yelp, and there’s nothing wrong with noting positive reviews on your blog, or sending them to followers via Twitter, etc. However, if the comments were indeed fake, the very best thing you can hope for us to be ignored. Worst case, you’ll be outed and ridiculed in front of the very audience you were hoping to impress.

Some suggestions:

1. Feel free to ask for reviews, but accept them warts and all. If you get a negative review, it’s OK to apologize, ask the person back (with some kind of offer) or correct things that are factual errors. It’s not OK to argue, no matter how painful the feedback might be.
2. Understand that you might get reviewed without asking to be — that’s the purpose of these kinds of sites. If you’re not checking on what people are saying about you online regularly, you’re asking for trouble.
3. If you get a piece of feedback you act upon, note it. If someone takes the time to give you a great piece of constructive criticism that you act upon, let people know you’re listening.
4. If there’s something you can’t change, but would like to explain, by all means do so. When Southwest Airlines gets complaints about scheduling issues on their blog, it’s not uncommon for the person in charge of scheduling to explain. Sometimes the answer is “sorry, but this is something we had to do.” If your customers understand why something is the way it is, they may be more willing to accept it. When I worked for Coors, customers would sometimes be furious that we weren’t offering a coupon in their market — until we told them it was illegal for us to do so in their state. Talk to your customers, they want a dialog.
5. If you end up with someone that’s posting mean, vile, inaccurate things, the community will often take care of that. If not, you can check with the site, as Terms of Service will often not allow off-topic, profane rants. Remember that a bad review is typically not grounds for a complaint, but slanderous, malicious or threatening posts can be. In some cases, the poster just wants to be heard. Someone once posted on Twitter that they wanted one of our clients to “die, die, die, die, die!” Two hours later, that person did a blog post about how well the problem was handled. Bottom line: don’t overreact.

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