What to Do When Your Reputation is Targeted Maliciously

When you have been in business as long as we have sometimes you become a target. Here is our story and what we have done about it.

A month ago or so, I was contacted by an owner of an e-commerce appliance store. This person wanted to hire us for blog writing services. As a routine part of qualifying our clients I reviewed the prospect’s website after an initial chat with him by phone. I then did a search for his business name and reviews. I was very surprised when I saw the volume of complaints about the prospect’s business. To be fair his business had positive reviews as well, but there were numerous negative reviews. Some complaints were documented with strong details, names, dates and situations as well as conversations with the management of the e-store.

At that time I decided that we were simply not a good match for this blog writing project. We are not the right resource for every business and not every prospect is the right match for us. I sent a decline note to the person and mentioned the reason was the number of negative review on epinions.com. The prospect then sent me a harassing email a week later that was over 500 words long and targeted me personally.

I routinely check my online reputation and came across a review posted by what appears to be the same person on an online site. The writing style and references to the situation were too similar to his situation to be of coincidence. However this time, the prospect made it sound like they had been a client and slammed our business and expertise.  Here is the complaint in its entirety.

Company knows little about E-Commerce. Total waste of time. Don’t spend your hard earned money with a company that knows little about the industry.

As writers, they should be experts. Company does not have the basic knowledge of the industry. I spoke with the owner who astounded me with her inability to do basic research and unreasonable attitude and policies to their customers.

Additionally, this person posted the complaint anonymously.

So, how does a legitimate business respond to a situation when they are targeted in this manner? You can chose to do nothing and hope it will go away, or chose to be upfront and address the situation head-on. I personally prefer the head-on approach.

I posted the following comment under the prospect’s complaint:

 I am Nancy McCord of McCord Web Services LLC.

Based on the information noted above and the writing style of the person making the complaint about our services, I believe that the person writing this “complaint” is a prospect that we decided would not be a good match for our services. We decided to not perform blogging services for them due to the large number of online complaints at epinions.com.

I believe that we have never provided services for this person in question or their business.

We work hard to keep our many blog writing customers satisfied and offer personal and responsive services.

You can view our many positive service reviews and samples of our blog writing work on our website at http://www.mccordweb.com/blog-writing/index.php.

Additionally, I am taking the time to further address this online complaint by posting a blog about the situation which will also appear on Twitter and the home page of my website today. We pride ourselves on responsive, friendly, professional blog writing services. If we have a complaint (and we have had very, very few in the years for which we have been blogging), we work hard to immediately rectify the problem. Our business has been built on writing quality, trust, and value. We don’t compromise when it comes to customer satisfaction!

It happens sometimes that a person may want to damage your reputation unfairly, but it is important to meet the difficulty head-on with a sense of urgency. I think that I have done so in this case.