A Bad Online Review Isn't Necessarily A Bad Thing

If you own or run a business, chances are a bad online review fills you with horror, pain, seething anger or some combination of all three. You take it personal. It cuts you like a knife, especially if it seems totally untrue and nothing but someone trolling your store. But there are reasons not to cry out in despair. There are a number of things you can do to mitigate its impact. And studies show having an occasional bad review is actually a good thing for your brand. Let's explore these reasons and techniques.

First of all, consumers don't look at bad reviews the same way business owners and managers do. Sure, if you have a lot of bad reviews you have deeper problems you need to fix. But if you have no bad reviews, consumers get wary. Nobody believes anything online could ever have no bad reviews. For one thing, there are always internet trolls who live to stir up trouble. They go out of their way to create bad feelings and stir people up. We've all seen it. We all expect it. Furthermore, everyone's experience with a store or restaurant or establishment is different, with different expectations – you can't please all the people all the time. And thirdly, people know that nobody's perfect, that everyone has a bad day sometime. It's bound to happen and when it does, someone's bound to write about it. So, study after study has shown that having a bad review among the good ones is actually perceived better than all good reviews. It makes all the reviews seem more authentic and believable.

This is not to say you should just ignore them. In fact, how you handle them can go a long way towards shaping positive or negative feelings about your business. In most cases, you should respond – publicly. Even if it's just to say, "we're sorry that happened. Please contact us and we'll do whatever we can to make it right." Then give them a way to connect offline (email, phone, DM or PM) If there is something you can do to rectify the situation or bring them back into the fold, offer it up right there where everyone can see you are doing the right thing. But make sure you're not doing it in a grandstanding way. You're not trying to draw attention; you're trying to resolve an issue. Don't get into a public argument though. That only leads to disaster. If it's obviously a troll, just say your' sorry they didn't have a better experience and leave it at that. If they try to draw you into a public fight, either offer them an offline channel to continue the conversation or simply ignore them. If you've built a strong community of supporters, they will probably come to your aid and say the things you can't say.

If the review is something that's coming up first page on search or high up on a review site, there are a few things you can do to try and drive it further from sight. One is to encourage those who had a good experience to write positive reviews. These will push the bad review down the list. The other is to create a lot of good content of your own that draws traffic and pushes the bad review further down in the search results. These could be blog posts, positive customer stories, videos, infographics, photos – anything that will engage your customer base and rank higher in search than the poor review.

As we move forward into this digital and social age, people have come to trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family. So, it's important that you have good reviews out there. Do everything you can to make the customer experience a good one and then encourage them to give a positive review. And remember a bad review every now and then isn't the end of the world. As much as you hate them, it's just a part of your business' life these days.

Mike McClure, hoping for good reviews of my latest blog post. 😉