Online Reviews: How to Respond to Fraudulent Reviews

Do people review your business online?

Ever receive negative or fraudulent reviews?

To discover what to do when you receive a review that's not what you were expecting, I interview Dan Lemin.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Daniel Lemin, the founder of One Good Brand. He is also a strategist for Convince & Convert, and author of the brand-new book, Manipurated.

Dan will explore online reviews and how to deal with bad and fraudulent reviews.

You'll discover why online reviews are so important.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Online Reviews
Dan's backstory

Dan started his online career with Google's corporate marketing team and saw the emergence of black hat SEO (search engine optimization). He explains the distinction between white hat (good) and black hat (bad) SEO, and talks about link farms as an example of black hat tactics.

Google came to love Yelp's fresh content and Dan says that's how the rating and review platforms attracted shadowy SEO characters. They saw the opportunity to continue "tricking" consumers through new platforms.

Listen to the show to discover why the owners of small- and medium-sized businesses need to know the dynamics of the SEO industry.

Why reviews are important

Dan shares that nearly 90% of consumers say they trust reviews as much as they trust their friends and family. Since so many people make decisions based on online reviews, the vast majority of a business's prospective customers are filtering through review sites.

Since Google favors this type of content, reviews are a new SEO tactic, and that's why site owners are adding some type of rating and review component. For instance, a lot of hospitality businesses like Starwood Hotels have added reviews to their websites.

He says one review will not necessarily make or break a business, but cautions that the presence of the review industry can make or break small businesses, because they don't have all the tools and techniques a large company like Chipotle might have.

When asked which review sites matter most, Dan explains his research found it really depends on the business category. For example, Gondola Adventures in Newport Beach, which is in a super-specialized industry, says Yelp matters, but TripAdvisor is even more important.

Dan says companies can track reviews manually by going to each review site, but it's very time-consuming. To help, there's a whole cottage industry of companies such as ReviewTrackers and ReviewPush that do review tracking for businesses.

Listen to the show to learn how much traffic Yelp gets from Google.

The purpose of fake reviews

Dan shares that there are different layers to the purpose of fake reviews.

He first discusses fake positive reviews and says that several weeks ago, Amazon filed an unprecedented lawsuit against 1,100 people. They accused anonymous people on Fiverr of selling reviews for profit on Amazon.

For his book, Dan interviewed a young lady who writes reviews for a living, and says it's very difficult to distinguish her reviews from legitimate ones.

Dan discusses fake reviews that are created to injure the reputation of a business. Dan also shares an example of another type of fake review, a scam that targeted wedding photographers in the Bay Area.

After responding to what looked like a legitimate inquiry from their websites, the photographers would get an email saying "I decided not to hire you" or "we changed the date." The email would go on to say, "I work in the online reputation business,