ionadas local LLC

What to do With that Negative Review

It can happen to the best of companies. You’ve worked hard to get your company to come up on Google Maps for your most important keywords. And just when you get your listing to the first page, someone hits you with a negative review.

What do you do now?

First of all, take a deep breath. All indications are that the quantity of reviews is much more important to the Google Maps algorithm than the quality of those reviews. Oddly enough, that negative review might actually help your rankings.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t help with the click through rate of those rankings. The negative review reflects badly on your company, especially if it is one of a handful of reviews (or worse, the only review).

Don’t give into the dark side and write a positive review of yourself (or ask your employees to do so). People really can sniff those things out without much effort, and it makes your company look all the worse.

Perhaps given enough time you could come up with self-written reviews that would pass the “sniff” test, but wouldn’t that effort be better spent on getting legitimate reviews?

Instead, ask your customers to post reviews of your company to Google Maps (or one of the databases that feeds into it). If you’ve been taking care of them, many will be happy to do it.

Next, let’s go back to the negative review itself. Those that write negative reviews online tend to fit into one of three buckets:

1. Those with completely legitimate concerns.
2. Those with concerns you don’t completely agree with, but who aren’t entirely unreasonable.
3. Those who are emotionally unbalanced in some way.

For the first group, the response is simple: fix their bloody problem. If you can’t figure out who exactly the customer is, make sure the next guy doesn’t have the same problem.

If you can’t fix the problem, you probably deserve the negative review (and the additional ones you’re likely going to receive).

The third group is a bit harder. If the reviewer is truly unhinged, engaging with him or her isn’t likely to do you any good.

I’ve got one client who received what he believed was an unreasonable review on Google Maps. I looked at the other reviews this guy had written, and of some thirty reviews, only two were even vaguely positive. All the rest were brutally negative. This didn’t seem to be a healthy person. Attempting to engage wasn’t going to help in any way.

In these cases, the best thing to do is almost always to walk away. However, if the review is truly defaming, and you can determine who posted it, you might explore legal action.

Disclosure: I am not a lawyer. What little I know about the legal matters I got from watching Law & Order and John Grisham movies. Those who actually follow what I say without gaining advice from qualified legal counsel deserves what happens to them.

You’re unlikely to receive any help from Google with the negative review. The concept of common carrier means Google actually exposes itself to more liability if it censors such things.

On the other hand, you could take legal action with the reviewer himself. If the reviewer made false claims of fact (that can’t be ascribed to opinion) a defamation case could perhaps be made.

Be aware that this route is expensive, could result in additional negative publicity, and could fail outright. Even if you win, the best that is likely to happen is that the review is taken down. People who behave like this tend to be judgment proof.

You are probably better off just moving on to the next customer, and making sure you give them outstanding service.

Note: I put false reviews by competitors into this third bucket as well. While you could potentially take a legal course, proving that a competitor posted the review is likely to be tough. You’re better off ignoring it and working to make sure you have lots of positive reviews.

The middle group can be the hardest. While you don’t think their review was fair, it’s not without merit. First of all, attempt to look at the situation without emotion. You may learn that there is more merit than you initially think.

For instance, even a case of improper expectations boils down to a mistake by your company, if those expectations were not set properly.

If you can determine who the reviewer is, attempting to engage may be worthwhile. In many cases, simply allowing the complaint to be heard may do a lot to smooth things over. You also may learn how to serve your customers better.

What’s almost always the case is that engaging with the situation is better than ignoring it.

In summary, your best defense against a negative review is to have lots of legitimate positive reviews. But when that negative review comes, don’t be afraid to engage with the review and fix the problem.

Google Cracking Down on Map Spam

For some time now, Google Maps has been rife with spam for locksmith-related keywords. Lead aggregators, whether companies or individuals, submit Local Business Listings for geographies all over the country. They often use fraudulent methods to push their own listings to the top of the Google Map results, and many times create multiple listings for the same aggregator within the same geography.

If fortunate, the people that call these services have a licensed, capable locksmith show up to help them.

If not so fortunate, the “locksmith” that shows up might be neither licensed nor capable. There are countless stories of the quoted cost suddenly going up once the person arrives. There are also reports of rip-offs and thefts.

Certainly, all industries have their share of scam artists. But for locksmith-related keywords, it’s often been difficult to find one legitimate practitioner within the Google 10-pack.

That has now finally started to change.

The blog “Understanding Google Maps & Local Search” reports that Google is beginning to crack down on Google Map spam, especially within the locksmith industry.

This is good news, although indications are that Google still has more work to do. Many spammy listings remain. In some cases, they still entail the bulk of the listings on a particular query.

There are also reports of seemingly innocent parties being caught in the crossfire, simply for having a particular term in their LBL. This is a clumsy approach on Google’s part, and I expect that it will be adjusted over time.

It should serve as a reminder, however, that with most things SEO:

Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered

If you’re in a competitive industry, you’re going to want/need to push the envelope to get the rankings for your company. But you should realize that the harder you push, the more likely you are to get smacked by Google. You don’t want that.

And don’t forget that there’s a difference between optimization and deception. The latter will tend to bring you unwanted attention.

Lastly, you should never rely on only a single marketing channel. Any marketing channel can disappear with little to no warning, especially one as in continuous state of flux like Google Maps. If Google Maps is your only marketing channel, and Google changes their algorithm in the wrong way for you, you may find your business heading in a bad direction very quickly.

And, last I checked, Washington wasn’t writing bail-out checks for local businesses.

Social Media Case Study: PowerWatch

Please forgive me if some of the details here are a bit fuzzy. This all happened thirteen or fourteen years ago.

In March of 1995, I joined a small computer manufacturer in Austin, Texas called Power Computing Corporation. Power Computing was the first licensee under Apple Computer’s new Mac OS licensing program. We made Mac clones.

My title was “Online Evangelist”. It was something of a catch-all job, with responsibilities for managing the website for the company, as well as for representing the company online. I monitored and engaged in conversations on web forums and Usenet, and was the gatekeeper of several of the public email aliases. It kept me busy, to say the least.

A few months later (don’t remember exactly how many), SDSU student Jeff Keller created PowerWatch, a consumer watchdog website. Either Jeff or someone he knew had had a problem with a purchase from Power Computing, and Jeff was going to make sure the world knew about it.

Anyone who has worked in computer hardware knows that problems with manufacturing happen. Sometimes you build a lemon. Sometimes the computer doesn’t get delivered on time. Or sometimes something is missing from the package. It happens to the best of companies. What’s important is how you react and how you fix the problem.

So, when PowerWatch came online, we could have tried to ignore the problem. We could have obfuscated. We could have done any number of things to try and cover the situation up.

Instead, Power Computing director of marketing Mike Rosenfelt and I decided to engage with PowerWatch.

I began to live on PowerWatch, visiting it three or four times a day. I answered pre- and post-sale questions. When I didn’t know the answer, I went and found out.

When people had a problem with their computer and/or order, I did everything I could to fix it. I received incredible backing and support from Rosenfelt and the executive team to get done what needed to be done. And it certainly help that Power Computing’s tech support and customer service teams had a great attitude about making things right for the customer. Many times, the fastest way to get something fixed was to go through PowerWatch.

Over time, we developed a huge base of fans that were willing to give us the benefit of the doubt when something went wrong. And we gained immeasurable data on what customers wanted from our computers.

This is what people today call social media marketing. Frankly, the idea isn’t that new, although the tools have gotten much better, and the percentage of the population online has certainly grown.

Social media marketing is about having a customer service mindset, and listening to your customers and prospects. It’s about engaging with customers when the the inevitable problems arise.

Then take what you learn and make your company better. That’s all there really is to it.

Trilogy Launches Local News Site?

Longtime Austin technology company Trilogy wants to ride the local advertising wave. Today it launched the alpha version of the Austin Post, a site focused on Austin news.

It will initially feature content from local bloggers, but if the site generates revenue, full time professional journalists may be hired.

As most know, newspapers are having a rather difficult time right now, but online only versions have significant advantages over the dead tree versions. It’s good to see something new being tried.

Local Search Comparison: [coffee shop austin]

On occasion, I’ll run the same query on multiple search engines to see how the results differ. Today I decided to look at a search phrase near and dear to my own heart: [coffee shop austin].

All queries were run through an internet connection in Cedar Park, Texas (just northwest of Austin). I was not logged into any of the search engines, so impact from personalized search should have been minimal. The captures were what was visible on my screen, which is set at 1440×900.

Disclosure: I don’t have any clients in the coffee industry at this time.

First let’s look at Google (click on the screen shot to see a larger version):

Both the Google Map listings and the first few organic listings show a nice selection of local coffee shops, although there seems to be a strong bias towards the central part of town. The Google Map listings also show a strong bias towards shops with lots of reviews.

The paid listings are a mess, however. Other than Austin Roasting Company, none of them actually sell coffee. Might want to work on the relevancy, Google.

Next up, Yahoo.

First thing I notice is how little content there is on the screen. Between organic, map and advertisements, we’re looking ten listings total. The same query on Google showed nineteen.

The “Also try” line is wasted space. I searched on [coffee shop austin]. Is [coffee shop austin texas] really going to be that much better.

I’m only able to see two organic listings. The first is a coffee shop in Winter Park, Florida. I suppose the link to YellowPages.com is useful, but it seems like an admission that Yahoo can’t deliver the information directly.

And given the number of coffee shops in this city, three map listings seems rather anemic.

As for the paid ads, at least they had one coffee shop in there. It was Starbucks, but what can you do? The rest seemed of more interest to those who own coffee shops then those who might want to visit a coffee shop.

Bing… I knew ya when you went by Live.com. And when you went by MSN Search. You’re like that weird, quiet little cousin that you only see every ten years at a family reunion, but don’t really know.

Having seven listings on the map is nice, but the map itself is almost impossible to read.

Of the four organic listings shown, three are actually coffee shops in Austin. Not bad, Microsoft. Again the Florida coffee shop is on top. It appears that Yahoo and Bing don’t use local signals within their organic listings as strongly as Google does. With “Austin” in the name, it’s not surprising that it comes up.

The paid listings are probably the worst so far, with none of them actually taking me to the website of an Austin coffee shop.

And how about Ask.com, the search engine everyone forgets about?

I like the map. It’s easy to read and has ten full listings. It’s completely biased towards downtown, however.

And I really like the “Other Location Matches” pulldown menu. That’s a very nice addition.

Ask doesn’t both to show any traditional organic listings above the fold.

The paid ads are, um, interesting. Real estate and online recipes from grocery store Randalls? That’s not targeted. At least our buddies $tarbucks are there again.

We’ll close this afternoon with the new kid on the block, WolframAlpha.

Well, that’s one big goose egg. It seems it was able to compute that it was about Austin and coffee but that’s about it. It’ll be interesting to see if they get better with geographic queries in the future.