How to handle a social media hijacking

{The following post originally appeared on my blog Radical Powersports on May 24th, 2010. I’m shutting that site down, but wanted to save some of these ol’ posts for posterity’s sake. If there are links in the post, they may not always work... Also, it’s amazing to re-read some of these and realize how (unfortunately) little the powersports industry has actually changed in 6 years...}

By now I think most of you reading this column have heeded the advice from my past columns and gotten onto the social media bandwagon in one form or another. You’ve got a Facebook fan page, a twitter account, maybe a MySpace page and if you’ve been really ambitious a blog or a forum. You’ve created a profile on Google Maps and Yelp where customers can post reviews. You’ve gotten out there in an attempt to make your business more visible. Unfortunately, that visibility can quickly turn you into a target.

Like so many things in life, there’s always the law of unintended consequences to deal with. The social media landscape is no less prone to subjecting you to this law. This month I’m going to address what happens when you get negative, harsh, or even intentionally hostile interactions on your social media channels.

In days gone by (a whopping 5 years ago or so) if a customer had a serious beef with your business, they were pretty much limited to things like the “We’re on your side” segment on the local news, a letter to the editor of your local paper or maybe a negative report to the BBB. These days it’s mind-bogglingly simple for a ticked-off person with an ax to grind to single-handily destroy, or at least seriously damage, your business’s online reputation. And a supreme irony here is that a lot of these soapboxes from which they shout were built by you!

There’s basically three variants of folks you’re going to have to deal with:

Category #1) The legitimately (at least to them) ill-treated customer that feels like they have not been able to get the resolution they want and has decided that they will “show you” and make the issue public.
Category #2) A person that is blatantly hijacking your public spaces or the web in general at the behest of a competitor.
Category #3) A common garden variety of internet troll.

I’ll give you some generally accepted methods to deal with each of these.

The first variety can be the most damaging if you deal with it badly. These are folks that have spent money with your business and feel that somehow they didn’t get the response they feel they deserved. Often these people have already talked to someone at your shop about their grievance (in person, phone, or email). That means if it gets to the point they are venting on your Facebook page or ripping you apart on Yelp your customer feedback process in the real world broke down. They left not just unsatisfied, but so pissed off that they have sworn a vendetta against you and by God they will personally see to it that not another living soul ever does business with you again (again, once upon a time there wasn’t that much one irate customer could do to you… Now all they need is a little time and know-how and this once idle threat can be alarmingly real).

There’s basically three outcomes from this kind of altercation. The first involves you taking a big step back to determine if this customer’s got a legitimate point. Not from your standpoint, but from the standpoint of a typical customer that is going to read what’s going on online. You may not like it, but customers have certain attitudes about what is and isn’t fair. Face it, you feel that way plenty of times. There’s always two sides to a story. Sure you can deny the guy’s extended warranty claim because of some small print, or sure the customer is supposed to deal with the manufacturer of that widget for repairs, but customers don’t always see it the way you want them to.

If you decide that it’s best to appease this irate individual then I recommend doing it offline and as part of the “agreement” convince them to post how the outcome was favorable and everything is just fine now.

Of course a great deal of damage can already be done because it’s probable that their Yelp review, “Crazy Harry’s MotoMall is run by a corrupt ferret!” has already been crawled by GoogleBot and indexed so that when someone Googles your business name they see the post header or page title, but never see the retraction or follow up. And no, Google (or even Yelp for that matter) will not remove that entry. Welcome to the brave new world of a permanent online record!

The second outcome is that you feel the customer is being unreasonable, you are almost 100% certain that most reasonable people would agree, so you post your side of the story calmly and clearly and wait for the general public consensus to come to your aid (i.e. your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, etc. rally behind you and essentially shout the complainer down).

The final outcome is just to ignore they guy. Let him vent, maybe let some of your forum members, Facebook fans, etc. defend you but you essentially remain above the fray. This option is probably not the best for small business. The big guys like Dell and Apple can operate this way because they are huge and the vocal minority, no matter how loud, will not make a large enough impact. You are a small business that relies on a smaller number of customers that may be swayed by the complainer’s arguments. Therefore I suggest that you engage these folks and don’t just ignore them.

Next up is something that’s gaining more wide-spread attention. Your competition, either directly or though various proxies, make a concerted effort to blow you up online. Believe it or not, there are actually companies that you can hire who’s sole purpose is to essentially nuke your online reputation. They don’t typically advertise this fact, but they are out there, often as a part of a marketing firm or SEO/SEM company.

It’s often hard to tell if what’s going on is the work of a “real” customer or a hit-job by a paid online assassin. The best indicator is if the negative online vibe is cranking up all at once, or if it’s just a onesy-twosy type thing. If you start seeing your business name all over the web in negative posts, or if you go from 3 positive reviews on Yelp to 300 Negative ones in the course of a few weeks, it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on.

Unfortunately if you get hit with this kind of thing, there’s really not much you can do to fight back beyond trying to overcome it with legitimate positive karma. If you have run a good business for years and you have thousands of legit and happy customers, fans on Facebook, or forum users, quite often your friends will come to your aid in denouncing the attackers. That’s the best you can hope for. A grass-roots uprising of supporters defending your honor in the court of public opinion. Of course if your business has developed a somewhat well deserved reputation as a place to get screwed and you’ve focused on how to squeeze every penny out of a deal at the risk of long-term customer loyalty, well… Karma’s a bitch.

There are companies starting up that focus on “online reputation management” that can help you out to an extent, but they are not typically cheap, nor are they fool-proof. If an attacker has created a ton of negative pages on websites like joe-bobs-moto-shack-sucks.com and avoid-joe-bobs-at-all-costs.com and they do some basic SEO so that when a person searches for your business in Google and your real site is #5 behind these assassination pages or a ton of negative reports on www.ripoffreport.com, your only recourse is to create some more sites and SEO them so that the “bad” pages fall off the first page in the SERPS (search engine results pages). Yes, it can get ugly.

The killer here is that as far as I can tell there’s nothing legally wrong with this if the pages, posts, reviews, etc. have factually accurate information. In the US at least the truth is a defense against libel and slander. So imagine that you get bad reviews from real customers on Yelp that rip you apart. An “attacker” can take the facts of those negative reviews and essentially repeat these “facts” on a few hundred websites, blogs, forums, etc.

Most of you out there do not have the luxury of really solid, defensible positions in the search engines therefore you are very vulnerable to this kind of attack. If you have not been in the top 5 or so for years for your own name, it would be really, really, really easy in a long afternoon for someone with the will and the know-how and a little bit of cash for domain registration to blow you away.

The last kind of issue you’re going to have to deal with are the internet “trolls.” Trolls are basically losers holed up in their parent’s basement basking in the relative anonymity that the internet provides and throwing grenades into online forums, Facebook, etc. just to make you look bad and to feel a power rush. Typically if they post under their own name like on Facebook, they are not a troll. If they post with a cool handle like m0T0dUde or something else anonymously they are a troll.

The primary axiom when it comes to these idiots is: “Don’t feed the trolls.” If you are positive that the poster in question is just a troll and does not fall into one of the above categories that require action or a response, just ignore them. Hopefully your loyal customers will beat these idiots back into their basement where they can go back to playing World of Warcraft or giggling like school girls at the latest LOLCATZ. But make sure that you do a good job of identifying the person as a troll. If you get it wrong and ignore them they can easily go into category #1 and if they are really pissed off at you, they can take it to category #2

The moral of this story is that today, more than ever, it’s vitally important that even marginally (in your eyes) pissed-off customers are handled before they get a chance to do real damage to your online reputation. The best defense is a good offense. Make sure you are running your business in a way that only the most unreasonable folks have cause to go screaming, pitchfork and torch in hand, through the virtual village to burn down your castle. Make sure that you have established a wide and deep social media presence and that you own site is SEO’d to the hilt so that it can’t get buried by negative decoy sites. Because now more than ever, the world is watching, and they ALL have access to the microphone.