Impression Management

A story that hit my desk today struck me as being an excellent example not only of how much more complicated business operations have become in the Internet Age, but also of how difficult it’s getting to categorize the information you get in off of the news channels. There are times when what looks at first to be a breakdown in (civility and common sense) worth of the Racing to the Bottom blog turns out to be a complicated case of “he-said, she-said” or even a question of ethics without any clear answer at all. Which way you view this case depends on a number of factors, only one of which is whom you decide to believe…

You can find the original story on USA Today Travel Online if you want to, but the basic story is that a couple was staying in a hotel in England when the manager burst into their room, accused them of posting negative reviews of his establishment on the Trip Advisor website, and ordered them to leave before he called the police. The story neglects to mention if the manager’s allegations were true, and there is no listing for the hotel in question currently up on Trip Advisor anyway (it might have been taken down due to the traffic attendant upon the news story), but that’s not really the point anyway; the question is how to interpret the facts presented…

Some of the news stories (and commenters) suggested that bad-mouthing a hotel in which you are currently staying is unwise, and we could perhaps agree with that. On the other hand, barging into a customer’s room and evicting them because you suspect they have posted uncomplimentary reviews about your business is completely asinine, and so is calling the police to remove people who aren’t actually doing anything wrong from your establishment. We could also point out that is these customers weren’t actually writing negative reviews before, they certainly will be now, and hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who never intended to do business with you before certainly won’t do so now, which makes these tactics even more absurd…

On the other hand, there have already been reported cases of people trying to use the threat of negative online reviews to extort money or free services from a variety of businesses, and in particular ones from the hospitality industry who are the most vulnerable to such rackets. We have no idea what words may have been exchanged between the customers and the management, what demands or counter-claims may have been made, or even what the manager would say about any of this, since his side of the story has been left out of the media accounts. It would appear that regardless of the circumstances he should have been able to come up with a better approach to the situation than this, but that’s not a call we should be making; he was there and we were not…

In the long run it probably won’t matter what really happened; the wired world has the attention span of a fruit fly, and within hours (if not minutes) there should be something more outrageous popping up on the news aggregation cites for people to outrage about. Unless the manager in our story makes a practice of this sort of thing it probably won’t come up again – and if it does, I would imagine he has a much better idea of what the consequences of such actions would be now. The real lesson here is for anyone who is, has, or ever will be the manager of any business that involves contact with the public, and that lesson is about image management…

You can’t control what your customers are going to say about you online, or anywhere else, anymore than you can decide whether or not scam artists will attempt to extort money from you using online reviews, or anything else. All you can do is provide the best possible service at competitive prices, remain calm and professional at all times, encourage people who DID enjoy doing business with you to write positive reviews if they can, and avoid causing the sort of public spectacle that results in news stories and statements from law enforcement agencies. If your business is a sound one, the truth will get out eventually. And if it isn’t… Well, perhaps you should spend more time reading comments your customers have written and see what you can do to improve…