What to do with Negative Publicity
Everyone has a bad review once in a while. The larger the company the more of them you will have. Some customers are more tech savvy than others and what had the potential to just be a bad review may become overblown and become a full on PR disaster . While this is every company’s nightmare, there are companies that can help in these cases. There are also a few things you can do to cut down on the negativity and sometimes you can even turn it into a positive experience for your company.
First of all, before you do have any negative publicity make sure that you have a process in place. It is even better if you already have an online reputation management campaign in process because then it will make the rest of these steps easier. It will also make it harder for negative publicity to hurt you . Make sure that if you do have a campaign going, you know what your plan is if you do come under attack and work this out with the professionals before hand. One of the keys here to remember is that no matter how much experience you have had with traditional PR, most SEO and ORM professionals have been doing this for some time, and know how to work the internet.
Be willing to make amends.
In all cases you should be willing to make amends if it is a real customer and they had an actual bad experience. If not making amends, work out what the problem is and how you can help them now. If you monitor what people are saying about you and you find someone who did have a bad experience, you can turn their negative publicity into positive publicity by working it out with them asap. When you do this, you turn that page into another testimonial about your customer service.
Be willing to ask for content to come down.
When it is a false report about your company, or if it is slanderous, you may be able to contact the publisher of the content and ask them to remove the content. This might not necessarily be the author. If it is a review site you may want to contact the review site, or the complaints board and explain to them how you know it is false and explain that it is slanderous. Many publishers don’t want that sort of material on their website anyway.