Posts Tagged ‘negative threads’

The first rule of how you deal with negative comments on a forum about your company is under NO circumstances respond to any comments.  If you do then your opening a can of worms.  Forums are normally places where joe blogs can blow off steam and vent their issues.  The last thing they want is somebody from “the company” defending themselves.

There are 3 good reason not to respond on a forum:

1. Forums are normally driven by people who have an issue or like a good discussion.  The last thing an annoyed customer wants is someone from the company defending themselves.  We have seen this in previous cases with clients who try to tackle such threads in forums are suddenly attacked and not just from the customer but also from other people who just love adding negative comments.
2. By adding to the discussion you are also making the page become active and therefore encouraging Google to rank the page / thread higher up in their such results (and no google will not remove these search resultswithout a court order).  The reason for this is google is trying to show the most relevant pages for a keyword, so if it sees a site with lots of activity then its more likely going to show that page higher up.  That’s why sites like wikipedia do so well because of all the activity on the site and the endless amount of pages and content.
3. You cannot control the content on a forum, so don’t even start a thread about your company as it won’t take long for negative comments to appear if not from a disgruntled customer then from a competitor (I know sounds sly and just because you would not do it to your competitors does not mean they have the same moral standards).

So how do you deal with negative comments on a forum? 

It can depend on the actual content in the forums, if it is slanderous then there is case to contact the site owner and ask for it to be removed before you take legal action.  Another way is to do a whois check and find out who owns the domain and who hosts it.  You can sometimes contact the hosting company who in turn if they agree with you can pull the whole site offline until the negative content is removed.

When emailing the site owner of the forum, add this “email is confidential” in all correspondence, do not add any comments to the actual threads.

Reputation management preventative measures

The best way to avoid these types of issues is of course through reputaion management preventative measures, what I mean by this is by owning the first couple pages of Google with your own positive content.  So if you have a blog make sure you keep it up to date.  If you have social network accounts keep them up to date and so on.  It is time consuming but well worth it, we of course can help manage you reputation online and can also help advise and remove negative content from the first page in Google.

How long does it take to remove negative content?

This can really depend on a few factors:

1. How competitive the keyword is we are trying to protect
2. How much authority the forum has, is it an old page / site, does it have lots of content and activity and so on
3. What Internet presence you already have and how much resources you have to help provide content.

We would normally expect to be getting good results within 3 to 6 months, sometimes quicker.  We do this in many ways but the bulk of it is by filling the net and feeding it with positive content.