By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-12-16 21:30:33 | Word Count: 664
Unfortunately, most companies will at some point experience the sting of a negative online review. In this open, online world, it is easy for a negative review to go viral and damage your company’s reputation, leading to a decline in business revenue. However, with the right techniques, you can effectively combat this negative publicity.
Remember that user generated content is everywhere now. The way search engine result pages select relevant data is by culling data to pick up fresh, new content. This impacts your business because, if someone posts a negative review of your company, say for instance on a blog, the review itself can generate comments, which turn into more comments, and so on. This takes place over a period of days, so each time a user posts a new comment, search engine spiders see it as fresh content. They will therefore pick it up. Other related sites and interested parties (such as your competitors and consumer review sites) will then pick up the review because it is already creating a buzz on the web, and they want Google to find them too. Many companies utilize programs that will just find buzz worthy content for them to add to their site; everyone wants to make the spiders think they have new content so that they’ll get ranked high on a search engine of social bookmarking site.
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You can see how all of these different agendas conspire to make a negative review of your company go viral, reaching large numbers of people and dissuading scores of potential new clients from trying your service or product. However, there are effective ways of managing and lessening the impact of a bad review.
First, you must confront the review head on—right on the site where it was published. Tell your side of the story and send a clear message to anyone following the discussion that you stand by your product or service. Make sure that when you do this, you invite the reviewer to call your company directly to resolve any dispute they have with you. This will show that your company takes complaints seriously.
Next, you should ask the website where the negative review is posted to remove it. If it has been picked up by a few places, it is important that you make a formal removal request to each one. Be clear and straightforward when you make this request, because most sites will not remove the content if they do not believe it was intended to be mean-spirited or that it is incorrect. Explain clearly why the negative review is based on incorrect information and how you know it is mean spirited (if it is).
Then, you should create new content addressing the complaint (but not necessarily directly) and syndicate it around the web in conspicuous places. This will enable you to control the terms and the tone of the dialogue, by making the correct information readily available to new viewers to be picked up as fresh content by search engines. In addition, this new positive content will be ranked higher than the older negative review on the search engine result pages.
Optimum7 can implement any of these strategies to help you business combat a negative review. Contact us today. You can call us at 1-800-736-9618.
