2. How Fake Reviews Can Harm Your Business
Ever think about writing your own online reviews, just to give a little boost to your business? No one will ever know, right? Think again. According to Giovinco, the New York Attorney General recently fined 19 search engine optimization companies for writing fake internet reviews. They set up a fake yogurt shop in Brooklyn to solicit unscrupulous SEO firms to generate glowing reviews on Yelp, Google, Yahoo and Citysearch. The total in fines was $350,000 for pieces written in Eastern Europe, Bangladesh and the Philippines for as little as a dollar apiece.
Yes, the bad remarks can hurt you. According to a 2011 Harvard Business School study, it is estimated that a one-star rating increase on Yelp translates to an increase of 5–9% in restaurant revenues.
But is the risk of the fakery worth it? Clearly, no. If caught, your reputation would sink to the floor. The way to garner that 1–2 star advantage with safety: Invite and remind your happy customers to leave their opinions online. Offer your customers a free dessert if they’ll take the extra minute to leave an opinion. Open a conversation with your desire to serve a client so well they’d want to leave you a 5-star review and make it easy to do so. And if you’ve disappointed a customer, act quickly to answer the situation or turn the situation around.
Which brings up another point: You should thoroughly investigate the reviews of any SEO firm you may use. Leave the “black hat” practitioners be.
1. How a Facebook Photo Can Ruin a Reputation
Did you know it’s possible to have your reputation ruined through Facebook even if you don’t maintain an active account? This was the case for an executive we’ll call “Henry” who believed he was safe from social media danger because his presence was low.
His daughter, however, was an active user on Facebook. She posted a photo, which in and of itself was innocuous, since it was just an image of a young girl on the street. But the caption identified that she was standing next to her father. It took some sleuthing, but a disgruntled ex-client who saw the image was able to use the connection to gather additional information. He mounted a costly smear campaign against the executive with the material he found. Immediately, negative blog posts began appearing at the top of Google’s results, damaging his personal and professional goals.
The moral of this story: If you don’t want to be identified in social media, make your friends and your children, especially, aware. Likewise, beware the photos and information you post of your children, for their own safety as well.