Bummer, huh? Especially because ticked off customers tend to respond more than happy customers. And bad competitors are apt to be aggressively negative. This is why the most important thing you can do is to be diligent in your listening.

If you find an illegitimate posting soon after it was submitted, and you are fairly certain it has been put there by a competitor, you can submit a complaint to the sponsor of its source (i.e. Yelp, Insider Pages) as well as the search engine (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo!). But you need to do it quickly. And you need to have legitimate backup to prove it.

If you find a negative, but legitimate, posting, 90% of the time it pays to respond to it publicly – no matter how painful that may be. If you also have a way to reach them offline without invading their privacy, it is obviously helpful. But, even more than the unhappy complainer, think what your response will do for a potential customer who reads it. You have the opportunity to show them you care, you are timely, and you’ve made an effort to right what might be a wrong. Only when it appears that you are dealing with an irrational person who would just use your response to continue degrading you or your company should you keep quiet.

Finally, the best thing you can do to get these comments out of readers eyesight is to “push them down”. That means create more relevant and current information that will show up higher in search results and move this older information down and off the first search page results.

If you have questions or want to talk more about this, feel free to contact us.

As many savvy marketers have already noted, all media is social. Especially when it works the way it’s supposed to. So what’s all the buzz about this term, social media, as if it’s a completely new form of communication?

Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumble Upon, etc. are just new communication tools. Tools that will most likely change and morph into new formats as technology advances and they improve their ability to create, manage and grow powerful online communities. Remember forums, chat rooms, even My Space? They’re all just tools that have enabled multiple-way communication, the core of what has changed.

We believe the term, social media, will go into the history books sooner vs. later. At least we hope so.

So guess what’s happening? People are starting to turn off and tune out. Especially those who’ve been trying to figure out how to listen over the past two years, when the amount of online noise has increased ten-fold. Oh sure, Facebook is growing. But users are becoming much more selective about who they friend. Meanwhile other tools, like Twitter and Friend Feed, are seeing 20% of their subscribers making 80% of the noise.

In short, quality over quantity is the new trend.

This is good news for smart marketers. With the proper tools you can find your perfect customers and they’ll be able to hear you. You won’t be fighting the equivalent of 1,300 daily traditional media messages the average American didn’t ask to see but the advertisers still paid for. Marketers will get to enjoy quality over quantity too.

Let’s see what happens when the noise quiets down and people start using all these wonderful (yet currently loud) online tools more effectively. It should be the best time good marketers have ever had.