The BBB, Reputation Management and Bad Reviews

by Tinu

This afternoon, I was reading an article at KikScore about the Better Business Bureau. I’ve heard many complaints about them over the past few years. Personally I don’t know what to think, as I’ve only been on the consumer end of using them as a point of research.

Here’s what Raj wrote that inspired me to write about this today, in his post entitled “Better Business Bureau – An Accreditation Process Based On How Much Money Your SmallBiz Pays?“:

Remember the Better Business Bureau?  Do you use it? Do you like it? If you found it helpful…well it might not be as helpful as you thought it would be.

According to MSNBC, the BBB’s accreditation process might be based purely on money. Criticism is being directed at the BBB’s aggressive membership sales process.  The BBB has admitted to making mistakes and said that they have reviewed the 16 factors that they consider when deciding whether or not give a business accreditation.  MSNBC’s post goes on to say that it’s better for consumers to solicit opinions on Social Media platforms on the business that you are interested in as opposed to specifically relying on the Better Business Bureau.

This is not the first time that there has been some criticism of BBB as we previously covered news reports by ABC News of BBB allegedly selling grades for small businesses.

The thing that alarms me about the BBB is that they seem to be taking an 20th century view of how to handle an upset customer into the 21st century. I wouldn’t argue against needing a place for people to complain and be heard once they exhaust all their other resources.

But part of me wonders why they never took the opportunity to paint a full picture. The BBB could have been the leaders at taking a neutral stance, and organizing a balanced picture of a company including the Entire social media picture of the company (%positive vs %negative, not just quantity of followers/connections/retweets/likes).

Because companies like Amazon have taken the way we view criticism to a new level. We mistrust products that have 100% positive reviews as much as we mistrust the ones that have 50% negative. We’re learning to accept that everyone doesn’t get along, and that sometimes it’s not that the company is a bad one, it’s that there was a bad fit.

It’s like when I’m reading movie reviews and I find one bad one – a lot of times someone who likes romantic comedies will give an action picture a bad score because it was an action picture.

But that’s not about quality of the product, that’s about expectation and preference. Just because you don’t like that kind of movie doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie.

Not to say that I’m advocating the right to just ignore pieces of information that we perceive as negative. It seems unfair that a person or company can say whatever they want to about another company or person without the other party being given equal time. Rip Off Report has rebuttals, yes, but have you ever given the weight of a rebuttal equal time in your mind on those sites, as a consumer? And is being on the defensive the best way to present yourself in a positive light?

Another way to view this is in the case of a bigger company trying to swallow a smaller company. If there’s no regulation beyond suing for slander or libel, then a big company could theoretically hire individuals to post negative views, or even help fund people who have grievances to attempt to pressure the small entity to sell, and not even know it was happening. Common, no, but not unheard of, not by a long shot. In that case is it really fair that the company with the larger resources wins?

Yes, with social media and proactive reputation management, the smaller company can persevere. But how many small corporations know to be proactive? I just read on Small Business trends that 47% of small business still don’t use social media! What will you defend your good name with if you don’t have these channels set up and active in advance? It is a long, hard, uphill struggle to build a good reputation on top of a bad one. There’s much less effort to ward off attacks from a strong offensive position – you may even have your fans rally on your behalf.

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Reputation Defense – How Do You Handle a Reputation Breach?

by Tinu

Handling Reputation Breaches

First understand that a reputation breach is ANY incident that smudges the image you want to project of your company.  These aren’t always originating from outside the company.

For example, if you want to project the image that you’re a company that listens, but you never answer your blog posts, that’s still a breach.

They’re also not always hostile or malicious. If your customers are unhappy because you changed something they like about your product, and they say so on your Facebook page – a lack of response is also a breach.

But of course, these breaches also include times when you look up your company name and find spam sites listed.

So what do you do?

 

  1. Handle the Incident Directly and ImmediatelyThe second you see a breach, it should be addressed. Make sure someone in every level of your organization is empowered to speak on behalf on the company within an hour of a breach, even if it’s just to say “thanks for pointing that out, we’re having an internal discussion about that, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
  2. If you’ve made a mistake, own it.Saving face is 20th century. Own up to mistakes. Simply having a person in power say “We’re sorry. What can we do to make it better.” is enough. In the case of a breach of your search results, skip the finger-pointing stage. Everyone involved in working on the web side of the company identity should accept responsibility for preventing future breaches, and get to work on making existing owned and leased web properties more appetizing than the spam results or false information.  Go back over suggestions from internal staff and service companies – recommendations that may have seemed trivial at the time may have been made to prevent the situation you’re in now. If you have those minds in place already, eat the humble pie and get those brains back on your side.
  3. Take action not just to recover from the current breach, but to prevent future breaches.Why did this happen? Were you looking at competitors in terms of making a better product, not just having better marketing? Did you attempt to build a better mouse trap without including the input of present mouse trap owners?  Is the community angry because they asked you to keep the one feature that you changed? Where is the bad press coming from? Is it one company responding to your success or is this an industry-wide problem that other companies like yours are facing due to public fears?
  4. Implement a test bed.Of course, you don’t want to post negative commentary against your own company to see how it holds up. Even when things don’t pop up in search, they can spread quickly in social if you don’t have some kind of strategy in place to address false rumors and the like. What you will want to do is continue to publish articles, images, videos, etc, on properties you own (your blog or press room) as well as those you only own a piece of (YouTube, Facebook), and pay attention to the traction they get naturally, in contrast to the results from an organized effort to have published items disseminated. It’s useful to understand how these communities work and what the signs of viral spread are, as well as to monitor your company and product name using Google and Yahoo alerts.

 

Reputation management isn’t just about keeping inaccurate data from false representing your company. It’s about presenting the best picture of your company that you can, and quickly addressing all the alternate views that may present themselves.

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