Friday, September 10  

Damage control

Damage control

Howdy. I've often written about the influence of word of mouth on a business and the importance of generating positive reviews.

But sometimes things don't always work out like that. Sometimes you'll make a great mistake or generally really annoy a customer.

The web can be a particularly harsh environment. With such easy and cheap access to a public forum, people can very easily damage another's reputation. There's nothing to stop someone slandering you in a forum.

And to chase it up can be time-consuming and just plain wasteful.

And here's a good example

If you take a look down the page (or in the archives) you'll see my post titled Navigation down side, broken links, etc. I wrote that on September 7.

Someone has jumped into the comments and written:

"Who designed your website Brendon, some poor sucker you underpaid as usual. Brendon actually knows jack about websites and rips people off with his carsalesman speal. Steer clear of this guy.

#posted by Anonymous : 2:30 PM"

I don't think that's my mum!

With something like that, you have a few choices:

# 1: Ignore it
# 2: Remove it
# 3: Respond to it (you can be angry, friendly, conciliatory, grumpy, logical whatever)

I'll provide an answer in 2 parts

That was actually the first time someone has come in and decided to have a vent. I thought initially I'd just remove it. But part of having the comments there is having feedback whether it's positive or negative.

If negative comments become too personal or crude then we'll take them off (takes just a second to hit the delete button).

After having a chat here in the office, we decided to keep it on.

Responding to the comment: Aside from the fact that I'm kind of doing that in this blog, there's really not too much to say!

When things go bad, you can jump in and defend yourself strongly. Or not at all.

If your situation is in front of a huge audience, then put together a rational and considered response putting your side of story. Always remember, some mud will stick no matter how lilly white you may be.

And aggressively defending yourself will only increase the attractiveness to the spectacle for people looking on. And the longer the negativity drags out, the more mud sticks.

Managing your reputation in business is a critical component for success.

Top 3 tips:

1. Be prepared. Have a plan for your response should an issue arise.
2. Act quickly. The longer you leave your response the more people believe the other side.
3. Be patient, calm and accessible to people who want to know more.

Which leaves me with 1 thing to do: respond to the comment.

Firstly, with anonymous comments it's usual to delete them. And very hard to respond. Re "...some poor sucker you underpaid as usual." If it's someone who's worked with us before, then contact us and we'll have a chat about your pay. If not, then they wouldn't know what we pay.

"...knows jack about web sites." The only thing I know is I know not much at all. The more stuff I learn the more I see I don't know. But I'd be happy to say I know more about getting sites to work than most people - Plenty of case studies to back that up (check out the ones on this site) and plenty of clients.

I've also written a book about web business that has done okay (sold $1 million in 12 months), I write the business newsletter for one of the web's most respected web resource sites (they have 135,000+ subscribers), I write a fair bit on this web site that people can judge regarding strategies for getting web sites (and businesses) to work.

So although I know a bit, more than happy to say I'm always learning.

Re "...rips people off" - we actually provide a 100% guarantee for any and all clients for any reasons whatsoever. So that one's actually impossible.

"Carsalesman speal (sic)" - always think car salesmen must get offended when people say that! If anonymous has met me, they might be able to make a judgment. But I don't think they have. Maybe my writing style comes across as cheesy, but that's more my untrained writing style. Not sure.

"Steer clear" - excellent pun after using the "car salesman" line. I'll pay that one!

Not sure if this person doesn't like the design or not (I get the feeling he doesn't). But that doesn't matter too much. When we did our survey a while back the overwhelming feedback was the site design is fine, just keeping adding information. So we do what our visitors want.

Cheers and have a good weekend.

Brendon