Jacquelyn Lynn, Business Writer, Speaker

Online Reputation Management: Lawsuit Resolution and Business Decisions

I told you about a company that sued me in small claims court for what I wrote on this blog. All of the posts related to this situation are listed under the category of “lawsuit” if you want to read them in chronological order.

I was fortunate to have the services of a great attorney, Dan Perry. From the very beginning he believed, as I did, that if this matter went to trial, I would prevail. However, it would cost me hundreds of dollars and several days of valuable time to travel from Florida to Boston to appear in court.

In an effort to avoid that, we made a business decision. He contacted the company’s attorney (who was not involved in the initial filing of the lawsuit) and made this offer: I would remove any reference to the company by name or description from my blog if they would dismiss the lawsuit.

Emotionally, it was not an easy decision, but it was a sound business decision. Everything I wrote about this company was accurate. If this company was suffering negative consequences, it was because of its own conduct, not because of what I wrote. But I simply did not want to spend the time or money to fight them. So I made a concession to make the issue go away.

I learned a lot from this process and I’ll be sharing those lessons with you in future articles. Stay tuned.

 

Jacquelyn Lynn 

Online Reputation Management: I got sued for a blog post

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a company that refused to accept responsibility when one of its representatives stole from a customer. I used the situation, which I learned about from an article by consumer columnist Greg Dawson in the Orlando Sentinel, to offer a few lessons on how a business should respond in a similar situation.

 

A few weeks later, I put up another post about that company. Dawson had reported that the company’s general manager was no longer employed there, and I was going to recognize that the company was taking at least some appropriate action. But before I could write that, Dawson corrected his report: the general manager was not only still there, but the company was gleeful about it. So my post repeated what had been published in the Orlando Sentinel.

 

A year or so after those first two posts went up, the company contacted me and asked me to take the post down because the information wasn’t true. I responded that they were giving me no evidence that it wasn’t true and offered to post their side of the story, but did not take the post down. But I did use the way they attempted to have me remove the post as an example of how not to approach online reputation management in another post.

 

I didn’t hear from this company again until May of 2009, when it sued me in Boston Small Claims Court.

 

Another Lesson in Online Reputation Management

Over the last not-quite-two years, I have written three times about a company, using the conduct of its service technician and senior management to illustrate some important customer relations issues.

 

Here's the background:

 

In August 2007, I first wrote about this company and the lessons that both consumers and businesses could learn from the situation that was described in Greg Dawson’s Orlando Sentinel column. Click here to see that post. (All of Dawson's columns referred to here are available in the archives at www.orlandosentinel.com for a small fee)

 

In September 2007, I posted a follow-up to that article. Click here to read that post.

 

Fast-forward to a year later: In August 2008, someone with this company e-mailed me and asked me to take the posts down, claiming the information wasn’t true. I offered to post his response on this blog, but he did not answer me on that. Click here to see the post I put up about that.

 

I would have completely forgotten about this except for the fact that my blog gets comments from people who want to share their experiences with this company. And then on May 11, 2009, I received notice that this company had sued me for slander (note: the correct term would be libel) in Boston. The claim states that I have no proof the incident ever happened and that "the post was removed by the original source due in part that their facts were fraudulent." Well, the "original source" was the Orlando Sentinel and the article wasn't removed due to any error but simply archived as the Sentinel regularly does.

 

When Greg Dawson learned of the suit, he shared the story in his May 24, 2009 column in the Orlando Sentinel, “Business digs itself a deeper hole.”

 

The trial is scheduled for July 20. I’ll keep you posted.

Jacquelyn Lynn

Online Reputation Management: A Critical Business Strategy

What’s your company’s online reputation? When you put your company name into Google or another search engine, what comes up on the first and second pages of the search results?

 

Lately I’ve been working with crisis management expert Jonathan Bernstein (Bernstein Crisis Management) on an online reputation management plan for a mutual client, and our discussions included strategies for dealing with negative online comments.

 

Bernstein says the first thing a company has to do is to deal with whatever prompted the negative comments. It works this way: fix the problem, admit publicly that you had a problem but it’s corrected, commit to making sure it won’t be repeated, and tell the public that you’re moving forward. People understand and forgive mistakes as long as they’re not chronic and as long as you own up to them rather than making excuses for them.

 

This is a lesson a company I have written about needs to learn.

 

When you do a Google search on this company's name, posts from this blog pop up on the first page. And those posts are not flattering the company, because they talk about one of the company’s technicians stealing the item he had been sent to repair, and then the company said it wasn't  responsible for the criminal actions of its contractors. To make it worse, the company admitted it didn’t run a background check on that particularcontractors, who turned out to have a criminal record.

 

Recently I received an e-mail from the general manager of the company. He was supposedly fired last year after the incident that prompted me to first write about the company, but apparently that was either a lie or he was quickly re-hired. In any case, in an e-mail to me, he wrote: “I am asking for you to remove the story on your website. The story is inaccurate and quite old. Negative feedback can hurt, especially when the information is not true.”

 

My response was that he had given me no evidence that the information wasn’t true and the post was staying up, but that he was welcome to add a comment.

 

If you read the earlier posts on this issue (the first, Company says it is not responsible for criminal acts of its employees, and the follow-up, A company that is irresponsible, unethical, and unable to tell the truth), you’ll see what Orlando Sentinel consumer reporter Greg Dawson had to say about the general manager.

 

A more effective strategy would have been for the company to admit the mistake, make meaningful restitution to the customer, and explain truthfully what the company has done to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The key word there is truthfully. This company is clearly still trying to trick people into trusting it.

 

If you want to clean up your online reputation, you first have to clean up your act.

 

Jacquelyn Lynn

Author, The Entrepreneur’s Almanac

A company that is irresponsible, unethical, and unable to tell the truth

Several weeks ago, I told you about a company that took the position that it was not responsible for the criminal acts of its employees—in particular, that the company wasn’t responsible for the fact that an employee whose background it failed to check stole a piece of equipment from a customer.

 

When Greg Dawson reported that the company’s general manager who made that decision was no longer there, I considered a follow-up post to say that the company was at least doing something right. But before I could write it, Dawson provided another update in his Orlando Sentinel column (Dawson's columns about this are all available in the archives at www.orlandosentinel.com for a fee).

 

Here’s what he wrote:

Beware These [removed]

If you thought [removed], the [removed] repair company that failed to take responsibility for sending a criminal into the home of a Winter Springs woman, couldn't sink any lower -- think again, lower. Much lower.

In a followup column, I reported that [removed], the general manager who refused to replace the woman's stolen [equipment], no longer worked for the company -- presumably fired for displaying the ethical sense of a garden slug. I learned of his departure from a man who answered the phone when I called the company after the initial column. "[Removed] doesn't work here anymore," he said.

He was lying, as I discovered a few days later when I received a mocking e-mail from [removed] over the [removed] logo. There was no message, just "realize" in the subject line. To verify, I called [removed] and was told, in almost gleeful tones by a woman on the switchboard, that [removed] was "still very securely employed here."

So, this is what you get with [removed]: A liar on the switchboard and a slimy trail in the management office. "Realize."

I’d like to add something, but what else is there to say?

Jacquelyn Lynn

Company says it is not responsible for criminal acts of its employees

Greg Dawson’s Aug. 9, 2007 consumer column (available for a fee in the archives at www.orlandosentinel.com) told a frightening tale of a woman who called a company to repair a  problem with a piece of equipment in her home. The company’s technician said he was taking the equipment for repair, and then stole it. That’s bad enough, but then the company admitted that it did not run a background check on the employee, who had a criminal record and no driver’s license (but was driving to jobs), and said it was not responsible for their employee’s criminal conduct.

 

The consumer lesson here is clear: Before you let anyone into your home for any reason, be sure you are dealing with a reputable company that screens employees and accepts responsibility for what their employees (or contractors) do.

 

The business lessons are also clear: the company made a series of major mistakes, all of which were avoidable. The company is going to get some bad publicity and may lose some business—it could have been much worse had the technician been more than a simple thief. He could, as the victim pointed out, been a rapist or murderer.

 

Businesses have the responsibility to run background checks on employees and to not put their customers and other employees in danger. If a business makes a hiring mistake, it needs to accept responsibility for whatever happened and make it right.

 

This company could probably have made the customer in this story happy with a sincere apology and replacing the stolen equipment. Instead, the company chose to refuse to accept responsibility and will justifiably suffer reputation damage far greater than the cost of doing the right thing in the first place.

 

Jacquelyn Lynn