How to Get (Bad) Reviews on Yelp – Easily! Cheaply! Free Reviews for Your Small Business!

Review marketing is critical for most small businesses. Getting good reviews on Yelp, Google Places, Citysearch and other review marketing sites is a critical objective for most small business marketers. Most marketers rack their brains – daily – on how to get good reviews on Yelp and other local search sites.

The Easiest Way to Get Yelp Reviews: Be Bad, Be Very Bad

I had an experience today with an Internet service provider’s unhelpful accounting department. Rude might come to mind, as well as all sorts of other words not suitable for a family WordPress blog. Pay us now, pay us what you owe us. Heck, pay us what you don’t even owe us! We are in accounting. We have no people skills. Our starting interaction with you – poor customer – is that you are a moron, and we are accountants. Let us point out paragraph 12 of your service agreement which says you will pay us gobs of money if you so much as bicker…

• You get the drift. Really really rude people. Self-righteous even.

That would have worked years ago. But not now. Like many Internet consumers today, besides disbelief at how rude the accounting rep was… My second gut feeling was – well, I’ll show you. Power up Yelp, write very nasty review of just how horrible this company is. Presto: instant, free review on Yelp of this local Internet Service Provider! Bad publicity for years to come.

Bad Local Reviews on Yelp – Easily, Cheaply!

Ironically, I did power up Yelp, did find this business on Yelp – and (guess what) many of the reviews are already bad. Guess I am not the first. But what’s ironic – I have been a good customer for twelve years! One bad experience is just a click away from becoming a part of this company’s permanent record on Yelp. An instant, horrible, terrible bad review on Yelp, saying just how badly I was treated by their accountant.

Bad Reviews on Yelp: What You can Do About them.

One word: PREVENT them. Talk to your staff. Remind them to at least start off with most customers on a friendly foot. Pissed off customers are much, much more likely to go to Yelp (or Google Places, or City Search or wherever) and review you. So try to NOT piss off your customers. Try to have processes in way (within reason) of course, to ensure that customers are treated with respect.

• Note: I am not saying you should be a push-over to every crazy customer. I am saying you should educate your staff to be positive, to start off on a positive note, to realize that if the customer isn’t always right, we should at least have a voice, there should at least be a businesslike, fair negotiation.

What burns me up in this instance is how rude from the moment go was this accounting rep. Tick, tock… I wait for a resolution – mouse in hand, ready to do battle with a big ISP that prior to today, I actually liked and would have recommended.