ionadas local Blog

It has always been a bad idea to submit false positive reviews to Google, Yahoo, Bing or the various local databases. They are easy to detect, and customers will be turned off. The company might even be called out on it publicly.

Now there is another reason to avoid this practice: it is actionable legally. The State of New York has a secured a $300,000 settlement with Lifestyle Lift. The employees of the cosmetics company were actively posting positive reviews of the company and attacking those who criticized Lifestyle Lift.

From the release:

Internal emails discovered by Attorney General Cuomo’s investigation show that Lifestyle Lift employees were given specific instructions to engage in this illegal activity. One e-mail to employees said: “Friday is going to be a slow day – I need you to devote the day to doing more postings on the web as a satisfied client.” Another internal email directed a Lifestyle Lift employee to “Put your wig and skirt on and tell them about the great experience you had.”

In addition to the fine, Lifestyle Lift employees are restricted from posing as consumers on the Internet. And the company is not allowed to promote Lifestyle Lift online without “clearly and conspicuously disclosing that they are responsible for the content.”

In the long run, what will likely hurt the most is the impact of the negative publicity on Lifestyle Lift’s brand. Anyone looking into the company will quickly find out about this malfeasance. As of this writing, the Attorney General press release is already 7th on Google for [lifestyle lift], and is likely to continue to climb.

Hat Tip to Understanding Google Maps & Local Search.

I’m a big believer in using WordPress to manage your website, even (especially?) when it’s more than just a blog. Between the ease of content management, the huge selection of graphical themes you can use, and the powerful plugins that you can add, it allows you to quickly and easily build a professional website.

The plugins are especially important, as they allow you to expand the capabilities of your site beyond what comes with WordPress. I believe all WordPress-based websites should have the following plugins installed:

Akismet
If you’re going to allow any sort of commenting on your site, such as for a blog within the website, this plugin is a must. It monitors the incoming spam to determine whether a comment is spam or not. Spam is moved to its own bucket which you can review at your leisure.

All in One SEO Pack
There are a number of SEO plugins for WordPress, and I go back and forth as to my favorite. Michael Torbert’s All in One SEO Pack is certainly one of the best, however.

Exclude Pages from Navigation
Each WordPress theme has a place where pages (as opposed to posts) are listed. You might want to not include a particular page in that list, however. This plugin adds a checkbox which allows you to do so.

Google Analyticator
No, Google Analytics doesn’t really give all the information you want, and who knows what Google is doing with all the proprietary data it gathers on your site, but the price is certainly right, and it’s a heck of a lot better than not having any analytics system. Google Analyticator allows you to easily manage the Google Analytics code on your site.

Google Sitemaps Generator
An XML Sitemap is a specially formatted list of all the pages on your site. It allows Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to more easily index your website. This plugin automatically creates a sitemap of all the pages on your site.

StatPress
In many ways even less powerful than Google Analytics, StatPress gives you insight into your visitors on a realtime basis.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade
This plugin makes upgrading to the latest version of WordPress much easier.

WordPress Database Backup
Almost as certain as death and taxes is the fact that hard drives crash. This plugin ensures that you have a backup of your entire WordPress system. When you do have a crash, this will make recovery much easier.

What are your favorite WordPress plugins?

It can happen to the best of companies. You’ve worked hard to get your company to come up on Google Maps for your most important keywords. And just when you get your listing to the first page, someone hits you with a negative review.

What do you do now?

First of all, take a deep breath. All indications are that the quantity of reviews is much more important to the Google Maps algorithm than the quality of those reviews. Oddly enough, that negative review might actually help your rankings.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t help with the click through rate of those rankings. The negative review reflects badly on your company, especially if it is one of a handful of reviews (or worse, the only review).

Don’t give into the dark side and write a positive review of yourself (or ask your employees to do so). People really can sniff those things out without much effort, and it makes your company look all the worse.

Perhaps given enough time you could come up with self-written reviews that would pass the “sniff” test, but wouldn’t that effort be better spent on getting legitimate reviews?

Instead, ask your customers to post reviews of your company to Google Maps (or one of the databases that feeds into it). If you’ve been taking care of them, many will be happy to do it.

Next, let’s go back to the negative review itself. Those that write negative reviews online tend to fit into one of three buckets:

1. Those with completely legitimate concerns.
2. Those with concerns you don’t completely agree with, but who aren’t entirely unreasonable.
3. Those who are emotionally unbalanced in some way.

For the first group, the response is simple: fix their bloody problem. If you can’t figure out who exactly the customer is, make sure the next guy doesn’t have the same problem.

If you can’t fix the problem, you probably deserve the negative review (and the additional ones you’re likely going to receive).

The third group is a bit harder. If the reviewer is truly unhinged, engaging with him or her isn’t likely to do you any good.

I’ve got one client who received what he believed was an unreasonable review on Google Maps. I looked at the other reviews this guy had written, and of some thirty reviews, only two were even vaguely positive. All the rest were brutally negative. This didn’t seem to be a healthy person. Attempting to engage wasn’t going to help in any way.

In these cases, the best thing to do is almost always to walk away. However, if the review is truly defaming, and you can determine who posted it, you might explore legal action.

Disclosure: I am not a lawyer. What little I know about the legal matters I got from watching Law & Order and John Grisham movies. Those who actually follow what I say without gaining advice from qualified legal counsel deserves what happens to them.

You’re unlikely to receive any help from Google with the negative review. The concept of common carrier means Google actually exposes itself to more liability if it censors such things.

On the other hand, you could take legal action with the reviewer himself. If the reviewer made false claims of fact (that can’t be ascribed to opinion) a defamation case could perhaps be made.

Be aware that this route is expensive, could result in additional negative publicity, and could fail outright. Even if you win, the best that is likely to happen is that the review is taken down. People who behave like this tend to be judgment proof.

You are probably better off just moving on to the next customer, and making sure you give them outstanding service.

Note: I put false reviews by competitors into this third bucket as well. While you could potentially take a legal course, proving that a competitor posted the review is likely to be tough. You’re better off ignoring it and working to make sure you have lots of positive reviews.

The middle group can be the hardest. While you don’t think their review was fair, it’s not without merit. First of all, attempt to look at the situation without emotion. You may learn that there is more merit than you initially think.

For instance, even a case of improper expectations boils down to a mistake by your company, if those expectations were not set properly.

If you can determine who the reviewer is, attempting to engage may be worthwhile. In many cases, simply allowing the complaint to be heard may do a lot to smooth things over. You also may learn how to serve your customers better.

What’s almost always the case is that engaging with the situation is better than ignoring it.

In summary, your best defense against a negative review is to have lots of legitimate positive reviews. But when that negative review comes, don’t be afraid to engage with the review and fix the problem.

For some time now, Google Maps has been rife with spam for locksmith-related keywords. Lead aggregators, whether companies or individuals, submit Local Business Listings for geographies all over the country. They often use fraudulent methods to push their own listings to the top of the Google Map results, and many times create multiple listings for the same aggregator within the same geography.

If fortunate, the people that call these services have a licensed, capable locksmith show up to help them.

If not so fortunate, the “locksmith” that shows up might be neither licensed nor capable. There are countless stories of the quoted cost suddenly going up once the person arrives. There are also reports of rip-offs and thefts.

Certainly, all industries have their share of scam artists. But for locksmith-related keywords, it’s often been difficult to find one legitimate practitioner within the Google 10-pack.

That has now finally started to change.

The blog “Understanding Google Maps & Local Search” reports that Google is beginning to crack down on Google Map spam, especially within the locksmith industry.

This is good news, although indications are that Google still has more work to do. Many spammy listings remain. In some cases, they still entail the bulk of the listings on a particular query.

There are also reports of seemingly innocent parties being caught in the crossfire, simply for having a particular term in their LBL. This is a clumsy approach on Google’s part, and I expect that it will be adjusted over time.

It should serve as a reminder, however, that with most things SEO:

Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered

If you’re in a competitive industry, you’re going to want/need to push the envelope to get the rankings for your company. But you should realize that the harder you push, the more likely you are to get smacked by Google. You don’t want that.

And don’t forget that there’s a difference between optimization and deception. The latter will tend to bring you unwanted attention.

Lastly, you should never rely on only a single marketing channel. Any marketing channel can disappear with little to no warning, especially one as in continuous state of flux like Google Maps. If Google Maps is your only marketing channel, and Google changes their algorithm in the wrong way for you, you may find your business heading in a bad direction very quickly.

And, last I checked, Washington wasn’t writing bail-out checks for local businesses.

Please forgive me if some of the details here are a bit fuzzy. This all happened thirteen or fourteen years ago.

In March of 1995, I joined a small computer manufacturer in Austin, Texas called Power Computing Corporation. Power Computing was the first licensee under Apple Computer’s new Mac OS licensing program. We made Mac clones.

My title was “Online Evangelist”. It was something of a catch-all job, with responsibilities for managing the website for the company, as well as for representing the company online. I monitored and engaged in conversations on web forums and Usenet, and was the gatekeeper of several of the public email aliases. It kept me busy, to say the least.

A few months later (don’t remember exactly how many), SDSU student Jeff Keller created PowerWatch, a consumer watchdog website. Either Jeff or someone he knew had had a problem with a purchase from Power Computing, and Jeff was going to make sure the world knew about it.

Anyone who has worked in computer hardware knows that problems with manufacturing happen. Sometimes you build a lemon. Sometimes the computer doesn’t get delivered on time. Or sometimes something is missing from the package. It happens to the best of companies. What’s important is how you react and how you fix the problem.

So, when PowerWatch came online, we could have tried to ignore the problem. We could have obfuscated. We could have done any number of things to try and cover the situation up.

Instead, Power Computing director of marketing Mike Rosenfelt and I decided to engage with PowerWatch.

I began to live on PowerWatch, visiting it three or four times a day. I answered pre- and post-sale questions. When I didn’t know the answer, I went and found out.

When people had a problem with their computer and/or order, I did everything I could to fix it. I received incredible backing and support from Rosenfelt and the executive team to get done what needed to be done. And it certainly help that Power Computing’s tech support and customer service teams had a great attitude about making things right for the customer. Many times, the fastest way to get something fixed was to go through PowerWatch.

Over time, we developed a huge base of fans that were willing to give us the benefit of the doubt when something went wrong. And we gained immeasurable data on what customers wanted from our computers.

This is what people today call social media marketing. Frankly, the idea isn’t that new, although the tools have gotten much better, and the percentage of the population online has certainly grown.

Social media marketing is about having a customer service mindset, and listening to your customers and prospects. It’s about engaging with customers when the the inevitable problems arise.

Then take what you learn and make your company better. That’s all there really is to it.