Case Study: A Little Voice With Large Ramifications

This case study will run through the travellings of a simple online review of an unhappy customer, and what the end result means for that business. This example is in fact real, a friend of mine posted this review online, and now I will share with you how not managing your online mentions, can seriously tarnish your reputation in more ways than you think.This is Social Media at its most simplest.

This friend of mine, lets just call him Patrick Fitzpatrick (or Pat for short), wants to go out to dinner. He goes online, types 'Italian restaurants' into Google, gets a few really pretty websites and some listings. He clicks on the listing he is interested in, and sees a map, but with no real reviews. The website looks nice, so he calls and makes a booking.

Worst night of his life. The food is disgusting, the service is appalling, no atmosphere - you name it, they didn't have it. Now Pat, being the type of guy that doesn't like to make a scene, pays and leaves. When he gets home, he writes a shockingly bad review under their Google listing - and from that point on, that restaurant will live with that review for the rest of their existence.

Here's why:

Google caches everything, meaning anything and everything that ever appears on Google, is saved - for life.
Can the restaurant request that a review be taken down from Google? By the time Google gets around to even considering it, it's already too late.
Restaurant review sites (there's millions) crawl Google review sites to populate their own websites
Many of these review sites at auto-Tweeted, meaning every review generates an automatic Tweet about that restaurant on Twitter
A user can type that restaurant's name into Twitter, and pull up the latest chatter about that restaurant
In a full-circle loop, Google then crawls and caches all of Twitter's feeds, populating their own reviews on listings. By this stage, there's no secret - but that's not all.
If you have an iPhone, there's an app called UrbanSpoon (there's heaps of review apps, but none with this type of reputation). With UrbanSpoon, you can select parameters for the restaurant and location you're after, and shake the iPhone. You end up with restaurants in that area that you could be interested in. Touching the restaurant, you're not only presented with their menus and pictures (all contributed by the public), but also a complete collection of reviews that appear anywhere on the net.
When word spreads about Pat's bad experience and others relate, everyone jumps on the bandwagon, and that restaurant sees a sharp decline in new customers. Again, this restaurant could easily take control by responding to all its negative publicity, but the longer it denies that it needs to stay on top of its virally negative word-of-mouth reviews, the longer it will have a major problem.

Social isn't a fad - its a response to the evolution of core human activities.

Until Next Time,

Tomer Garzberg (Keynote Social Media Speaker).

http://ping.fm/iUQoV