Reputation marketing is the new normal for businesses to promote themselves. Using Social Media (Facebook, Linkedin, Trustpilot to name a few), is seen as the way for a customer to protect themselves from rouge traders. What do you need to do when you get attacked by someone Trolling your business?
Recently we have been targeted by someone trying to affect our image, we worked hard and reported everything the right way, and at time of writing this we’re still working on it. So let me share what we learnt.
Remember first and foremost that you’re a business and taking it personally will only play into their hands. Take your time before dealing with the first post and evaluate it if it genuine or fake, perhaps even wait an hour or two to see if more come along.
ID the suspect as Real or Troll – Use your customer database to match the information they are giving you and be honest if they are using FACTS! If they want to damage your reputation one feedback isn’t enough.
Report them! It’s important that you report them to the correct department, the next stage is damage mitigation, so get it reported. Various different platforms have methods to do this, we’ll start with the site we got attacked from, Trustpilot. Our attacker was clever and waiting until the Bank Holiday weekend, outside the opening hours of the support team, meaning we couldn’t talk to anyone to help us.
Click Report and you’ll be presented with 3 categories, choose the one you believe is true and then follow the instructions. Be clear and provide evidence to Trustpilot as why you believe this is an attack and then submit, you’ll be asked to provide a public review for all to see. Be honest and tell everyone the truth, below is the last one we used.
Let everyone know you’re under attack, use other forms of social media to inform people and get help from your dedicated customers to shore up your PR. This is the hardest bit, you now have to wait for the various sites to follow their procedures and review the material. If you’re lucky, all this hard work will pay off and the attacker will stop, otherwise you may need to take this legal, find a good solicitor who specialises in Business Law and ask them how you can procedure.
What about other platforms?
Twitter will let you delete tweets but it won’t remove the message from the user, to delete the tweet click on the down arrow and then delete tweet
After this go to the user name of the person attacking you, click on 3 dots beside the follow icon and Mute. This stops them from posting to your feed, if you get multiple accounts doing the same thing, contact Twitter and ask for their help.
With Facebook you can preconfigure it to allow you to *check* all incoming posts before they appear on your timeline, turn this feature on and then you can stop all future posts before they happen. You can also delete a post by clicking on the down arrow and selecting *delete from page*
Dealing with attacks is always going to be difficult, just stay professional, gather as much information as possible and seek legal advice if needed!
Having the right web hosting will help your reputation no end, with a perfect reputation requires a UK web hosting platform. Working with UK suppliers will help cement your positive comment, especially if you’re marketing to a local audience. Come talk to us at Solblu.uk and we’ll see what we can do.