People believe everything they read, see, or hear. If you are in business long enough, there will be a person or company who decides that they need to broadcast to the world how terrible you are. It may be simply to promote their own business, or it may be because you’ve wronged them. Whatever the reason, you can defeat the negativity in 5 simple steps.

1. Measure the Effect of the Slander
   • Client Reach: Research shows that negative publicity only affects a brand if the brand’s identity inside the mind of the consumer is either weak or already negative. What that means in layman’s terms: the only people who care about what is said of you (if it is negative) are people who already think negatively of you. Therefore you have to take into consideration who will see these harsh words. If the dirty laundry is on the web, does it show up on searches for your brand? Use the Wordtracker Keyword Tool and find out how many of those searches are conducted each day and compare them to your daily visitors or average daily leads. If your company is bringing in 100 leads a day and the comments show up on searches that are only performed twice a day, you may want to just forget about it. On the contrary, if the keyword search includes your brand name, as your business grows, it will only get harder to fight that negativity due to the research-driven purpose behind must brand queries. If it is offline, how far does it extend? Is it a national campaign against your business, or is it someone with a picket sign standing outside your door? Chances are the picket sign will do much more damage because of the intimacy involved with a one-on-one personal interaction.
   • Business Plan Damage: Does it contain valuable inside information that will hurt your business model if let out? Is it from a disgruntled employee? Does it reveal one of your weaknesses or exploit one of your threats you analyzed for in your SWOT analysis? You may want to weigh this heavily if any of these are the case.
   • Your Industry: Is your industry one where your success is heavily dependent on your reputation? Is it just a single product that is getting the bad reputation or the entire company? A retail store customer will be less influenced by negativity than a company in a service related industry. A consultant, for instance, is heavily reliant on their reputation and will receive a lot of late-stage-buyer queries on their brand name. A high-Google-ranking slander will definitely change the game there. How small is your market? A local home inspector will be greatly affected if they get a bad reputation amongst the local realtors whereas almost any B2C business will not be affected by the same reputation.

   In short, is the tarnish that is put on your reputation even worth acting upon? Before you take the time or spend the money to do anything about it, you must answer this question. Some things to consider:

2. How Much Damage Has Already Been Done? What may seem like a horrible occurrance may actually not have any effect on you at all. In fact, it may even help you. If the bad remarks have been around for awhile, check your business: has it slowed at all? Have your profits changed? Revenue? If not, you may not want to change it. If it is too early, you may want to wait to see the effect. Many companies swear there is no such thing as bad publicity.
3. Cost benefit analysis You should do a very thorough evaluation as to how much you are willing to spend on the "fixing" of the reputation. How much do you stand to gain from it? In almost every case, the amount of time, effort, and capital that is required to achieve success is not offset by the gain. Don’t make it personal… it’s just business. Some aspects to consider:
   • The cost of positive or responsive ads
   • Buying links to raise your search engine ranking above the negative posts
   • If necessary, hiring of a reputation management firm
   • The time to create pages, build links, and wait for indexing/ranking
   • Of course… lawyers
   • Is it going to be a permanent, recurring cost? If this is going to start a war, you may not want to start unless you have to capital to finish
   • Are you prepared to face a lawsuit yourself? Do you have enough resources to deal with the backlash? Keep in mind, this may not be the last round
4. Set Your Goals: It’s just like anything else in life and business; how do you know when you’re successful if you haven’t defined success? What do you want in the end? A quiet harasser? Compensation? Anything permanent like taking your competition completely out of business?
5. Take Action One thing I learned in the military is that you should always try to resolve conflicts on the lowest level possible. This will create less attention toward the negativity and the give less credibility toward the accuser. If a phone call or simple email will fix the problem, feel free to give the person a call. Be polite and nice, but be stern. Make sure you get on the phone with a set goal and don’t get off the phone until you either a) get your goal, or b) get to the point where you feel it will take a little more to get your point across. Some further actions you might take:
   • Write a Cease and Dessist Letter: Most small bloggers or companies don’t have enough resolve to go through any sort of confrontation, so a simple cease and dessist letter will usually do the trick. You can send one to anybody for any reason, and there doesn’t have to be any legality to it. Here is a great example of a cease and desist letter from Direct Buy.Don’t stop at a letter to just the person, though, write one to their web host and whatever company they work for. Most web hosts will contact the person or shut them down and almost every company I know of will do the same: nobody wants a lawsuit.
   • Fight Fire with Fire: Kick them out of the search engine rankings. Run a commercial stating the facts about your company and addressing every one of the issues that the person brings up. If the slander is telling the truth, well, admit to it! Then make amends with your customers and move on. One note: Do NOT mention the slanderous person or the context in which it was discussed. You do not want to draw any more attention to the negativity than has already been brought.
   • Bring them to Small Claims Court: This is advice only meant for businesses in the United States, but if you sue somebody in small claims court, most people will not even show up. Even though that will not guarantee that the person will stop, I think 99% of all people will. Lawyers are not allowed in small claims court, making this an easy and quick alternative to the next option
   • Lastly, File a Lawsuit: The cat is out of the bag with this one. There is a lot of good that will come of a lawsuit: the truth WILL come out, attention will be drawn to you (not neccesarily a bad thing – it may turn out to be ‘free’ publicity that launches a business), and you may get some financial recourse out of it. The key here is find a good lawyer. Don’t skimp out on a cheap one: it’ll pay off in the end.

In all, there are very few times when negative publicity will warrant any sort of response. When it does, keep the attention to a minimum, make it good, and make it count. Just always remember to maintain yourself as the leader and professional businessperson that you are. Don’t make it personal.

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Friday, 1 Feb 2008 Filed under: PR by Bryan

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