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