Finding news stories, blog posts and other content about “the problem with user reviews” isn’t hard. Reviews and rankings connect with so many disciplines – marketing, hospitality and increasingly lawyers and legislators – that virtually everyone now has a stake in them. But what seemed relatively simple as a brilliant business idea to connect companies and their customers through the value of review data and the communities that exchange it has become complicated by questions of fraud and defamation.
It’s not that user reviews don’t matter anymore. To the contrary, they matter more than ever, and that’s the reason why countries are looking how to regulate the process better, companies are vigilant about managing online reputations, and reputable review sites want customers to know how they operate.
Social Media As A Weapon
In all that content about astroturfing, pay-to-play review fraud, and court cases that range from high-end retailers caught paying their social media influencers, to companies suing clients over negative user reviews and contractual clauses, there’s one issue that often gets overlooked. Shrabonti Bagchi, writing from India, includes it in her recent and unusually powerful lament over user reviews and the “loss of innocence” that’s tainted the industry – and it’s what she calls “brand bullying” on the basis of vendetta.
There are other definitions of brand bullying, notably in trademark usage, but Bagchi hones in on the growing trend to launch a social media campaign against businesses – or sports franchises or political opponents – in massive user numbers. What it most resembles is almost a DDOS-like attack on targets that are overwhelmed by the volume of negative review information, and lost as to what to do about it.
“Even more egregious,” Bagchi writes in her litany of bad-review-behavior examples, “is the attempt by powerful groups to bully brands and companies by downrating them in order to ‘teach them a lesson.’”
She cites a few examples, including one in which a cultural advocacy group claimed that a Bangalore nightspot refused to play Kannada music. This infuriated the group, which seeks to promote the culture and language of millions of Indians living primarily in the south, and widen the influence of Kannadigas.
When they felt snubbed, they did what everyone does these days. “This semi-vigilante group went on a rampage on social media,” Bagchi explains. They encouraged followers to downgrade the venue on Facebook and Google, and bragged that they had spiked the pub’s ratings from a healthy 4.5 to a 2.5.
That story is familiar to anyone who has ever been asked to boycott a business for real or perceived offenses – a pizza shop in Indiana, a major oil company in Texas, countless retailers in apparel made overseas – but what if, on a much smaller scale, it’s your own company that’s the target on Twitter?
That’s what happened in 2009, when Maytag was on the short end of a dissatisfied customer who just happened to be a prominent blogger with more than a million Twitter followers and told them all about her negative experience – in short, a negative user review nightmare. But if you think that infamous tweet by Heather Armstrong is ancient history, you’d be wrong. It came up again in May, when all the claims of bullying in the American political climate prompted The Atlantic to revisit just how bad it is.
How Bad Is It?
Most companies won’t experience that kind of social media storm, and some of them – the famous “United Breaks Guitars” song comes to mind – undoubtedly deserve their negative reviews. A Harvard Business School case study of the airline’s response to musician Dave Carroll and the ensuing wildfire of negative perception praised the company’s visibility and engagement in quickly responding through the same social media channels where the messaging originated. On the other hand, the viral moment fades quickly, and the better response may be to acknowledge, act to remedy, and let it go. Spending the company’s energy on positive initiatives to help rebuild the brand may make more sense.
One thing that’s consistent, though, is how visible companies are – and how easy it is to critique them with minimal consequences in the immediacy of Twitter, a Facebook post or an emotional user review. The best defense against a concentrated effort to downgrade a firm may be its long-term consistency, and the best response, at least initially, to an attack on a specific product is to stand by what you make.
“It's a transparent world,” said John Deighton, the Harvard co-author of the case study on the United incident. “This is an environment in which you simply have to be what you say you are. You can't hope to project an idealized version of the truth.” Which is one of the bright spots for companies who integrate user reviews into their overall marketing structure – because they’re never the ones creating the truth.
The “truth” belongs to the community of users who write legitimate reviews of products and services. Any company that considers the impact of a negative campaign, orchestrated or not, knows that their reputation management and risk is always a priority, not just when they’re faced with damage control. In the same way, the careful cultivation of a connected community – as in the case of a California car dealership, where customers say they’re influenced by responses, not stars – will serve as a foundation.
In relatively rare cases, companies may need the support of a review platform provider to help them prevent or mitigate the damage when confronted with malicious attacks in the form of negative user reviews, whether that’s a one-off post from an unscrupulous competitor or a coordinated crowd attack. In some cases, those same firms may need additional assistance from lawyers or even law enforcement.
But there are smart strategies for dealing with “brand bullying” reviews, and the good news is that they’re the ones you already know. Companies who engage communities, invite customer reviews, offer them on a reliable platform and commit to transparency, have already created their best defense today against any attacks they face tomorrow.
Jeev Trika is CEO and founder of CrowdReviews.com, a crowd-driven platform for reviewing and ranking companies providing goods and services across multiple categories, for both businesses and consumers. The consumer-friendly site is the first unbiased and fully transparent reviews site to be driven completely by the crowd.
