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What NOT to Do When Everybody’s a Reviewer

Right now (well, when I started this), I’m sitting in one of my favorite local restaurants (they have wifi), and I’m thinking about social media.

This is not nearly as obsessive as it sounds, because I’d gotten to know the owners after they mentioned they’d seen some photos I’d taken at the place during a party, and posted them to my blog and Flickr.

How did they find what I’d posted? They searched on their restaurant’s name, of course. For a business, it’s more important than a mere vanity search, and it’s something you should do regularly.

People throw around terms like reputation management, but it’s just a fancy way of seeing what people are saying about your business, and figuring out how you should respond. And remember, with all this fancy Web and social media stuff, regular folks — your customers — are all potential reviewers and publishers.

So, say you’re a business owner doing your due diligence, and you find some negative reviews somewhere; things that you feel are blatantly false, misrepresentations of what you do, even outright attacks. What you do? How should you respond?

(In this entry, I’m going to focus on reactive stuff — strategies for responding. In a later post, I’ll look at some proactive strategies.)

Here a few things NOT to do:

* Immediately fly off the handle, get into a public flamewar with the poster (or a private one, as they inevitably become public), make threats, or generally do anything while you’re angry.

* Create a series of fake accounts so you can post glowing reviews of your business, to offset the negative ones (it’s pretty obvious when you do this, especially if you’re on a review site and this is your only contribution. Or if you post the same thing to lots of sites, which is especially clumsy and lame.)

* Beg and bother your friends to shill for you. This is also pretty obvious.

* Start harassing or threatening to sue the review site operators to take down negative reviews. This smacks of desperation.

How to respond to reviews depends on the nature of the site you’re looking for, its culture, and what kind of provisions it has for business owners to respond.

For example, one of the current big “It” social review sites is Yelp; an article that’s gotten a lot of traction online is How to Manage Your Yelp Review, and Yelp has its own guide for business owners, which has some pretty good general guidelines, as well as tips specific to the way things work at Yelp. (Also see this NYT profile of Yelp and Yelp users.)

Be sure to check out all the sites that have reviews of your business. These may include other social reviews sites (for example, other restaurant review sites include Chowhound, Menuism, and ChefMoz, to name only a few), newspapers (including their entertainment or city guides), local and regional magazines and Web sites, business directories, and the like.

Before you get into the comments and reviews, make sure that all of your business’ basic information is correct — address, contact information, operating hours, etc. (and find the site’s corrections policy or contact information if you need to send a correction request — politely).

Next, look at the user-submitted reviews. Sure, you’ll like the positive ones, but look closely at the negative comments: Do they contain any truth — things you can improve on? If so, consider it unvarnished feedback that you can use to help improve your business.

Now, say you take an action specifically addressing someone’s complaint. Responding to individuals is always a tricky thing.They may have legit grievances, or may merely feel that way. They may have unrealistic expectations, or an honest difference of opinion. And they might be cranks, nutjobs, or malcontents.

The best general strategy I can offer, subject to the norms of the site you’re responding on is: Acknowledge the feedback; apologize for any perceived bad experience; discuss steps you’ve taken to address the complaints, and if necessary, offer to make things right. It’s pretty much the same way you would respond in person to someone with a complaint, only this way is crawlable by a search engine and will live a long time on the Web. So be careful.

We know that “the customer is always right,” and we also know that some people will never be happy. However, it’s your public response to complaints that will help other people figure out what to think about those negative reviews.

Remember, anytime you respond to a comment, you’re not just responding to the commenter — you’re responding to everyone who’s ever going to see that comment. If you respond to someone’s rants and raves in an authentic and open manner, and they still throw the crazy at you, other people will see this.

Community review sites are an important resource for people, and they could be a big driver of business for you. Next, I’ll look at some suggestions for proactive things you can do to help improve your reviews and word-of-mouth.

Do you have experience dealing with feedback on social review sites? Have tips you’d like to share? Please leave a comment, I’d love to hear from real-world success (or horror) stories.

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