What are the risks of engaging with Unsolicited Online Reputation Management Services? Can they be that bad? Can you get away with it?
As someone who has been doing Online Reputation Management for over a decade I will give you the benefit of my experience.
What is Online Reputation Management
Put simply, online reputation management is the process by which negative online brand mentions and your online persona is managed back into being a positive one.
I must point out that (like SEO) there is the right way to do online reputation management and then there is the wrong way, that almost always ends up making matters worse.
Many businesses have at some point had to deal with getting an online bad review. Its part of the course of doing business offline as well as online.
The satisfaction and experiences we get from the products and services we purchase will be somewhat subjective to the person experiencing them. Haven’t we all heard the phrase, ‘One persons trash is another’s gold?’
Yet when it comes to online reviews of products and services, there is a very real tendency for many a dissatisfied consumer to embellish and exaggerate their experience. In turn, there is a tendency for the reviewed business to over-respond to the review.
How Should you React to a Bad Online Review?
Whilst there are some notable examples of ‘how not to respond to a bad review’ on a local, national and international level, with some elevated to being a meme or in the Internet Hall of Fame so to speak, for most people the best practice method of replying to a bad review is to:
Respond Politely / Address the Issue / Offer a Resolution
The individual circumstances of the customer dissatisfaction, the issues, the context of those issues and what resolutions are available are all variables but the formula is essentially the same.
What about Unsolicited Online Reputation Management Services?
Now on to the central point of this post. Should you consider someone whom has sent you an unsolicited request to engage their Online Reputation Management Services?
If the message is spam or from a throwaway email like Gmail then alarm-bells should be ringing.
Herein lies the fact that despite most reasonable people of even the most basic logic and being of enough sound mind to never engage with anyone sending you spam, the sense of urgency and fear that acts as a hook in these encounters plays on the fear of the person getting the spam email.
Just las with phishing emails that claim ‘if you dont click this link to your online banking fraud department, you will lose your life’s savings’, the spam in this case of bad online reviews hits the nerve in that the spammers either pray on the fear of the recipient, or they tempt them with an offer that to most people, would seem to good to be true.
What Could Go Wrong with Unsolicited Online Reputation Management Services?
What could go right?
In short, like using unscrupulous ‘SEO consultants’, unscrupulous and unsolicited online reputation management services are out for maximising their own profits and whether this is to your detriment if of no concern.
They may just take your money and run.
They may say that they need access to your website to install customer experience software and then compromise your website.
Or they may take your money, do a half arsed attempt at online reputation management which involves plenty of things you shouldn’t do plus a whole host of things there are laws against.
Notwithstanding the fact that soliciting fake reviews is illegal and it can lead to a prosecution under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Act, what is more immediate and almost always likely is that you would be exposed as a business that buys fake reviews.
If you are exposed as a business that buys fake reviews your reputation will be even worse then when you had the bad review as you will lose all trust and credibility and gain the assumption that any genuine positive reviews you have, are also fake.
The Short-sighted Fix to Online Reputation Management
Those who engage unsolicited online reputation management services generally falls into two groups.
The ones that dont understand the risks or the potential for any fallout if/when it goes wrong and they just want a quick fix. But then there are those whom have no intention of addressing customer concerns and just want to hide away their own bad business practices.
We dont engage with the those whom just want to hide away their own bad business practices
Businesses are run by people and people make mistakes.
We can forget to do things. We can have errors in judgement and in business, those errors can lead to bad customer outcomes and as a result bad reviews. But the worst thing a business owner can do is to ignore the issues that lead to a mistake that in turn led to a bad review. In this scenario you are only addressing the symptom and not the cause of your bad customer experiences and like whack-a-mole, if you just address the reviews and not the cause, there will certainly be more bad reviews headed your way.
One bad review can be easily overcome and several bad reviews present more of a challenge, but non stop bad reviews (especially if they have merit) are almost impossible to recover from.
Have you had a Bad Online Review
Whether you want an hour long consultation, a written response to a bad review or something more in-depth involving a full analysis of your business practices and customer engagement get in touch for a No Obligation Consultation
