Dealing with Bad Reviews

I have personally no experience with negative/bad feedback but here are two articles I just found on Google about your problem:

How To Deal With Negative Feedback | Motivate Thyself

Deal with Negative Feedback by Asking Solution-Focused Questions

There are reputation companies out there.... but I would work on getting more reviews to out eeigh the bad ones....

Its not always bad to have bad reviews.... I have sold a rake load of products by giving them bad reviews so its not something to panic too much about....

Danny

I have, but not regarding anything to do with internet marketing. The issue wasn't even (wholly) my fault, but I compensated the "injured" party at my own expense and not only were they thankful, but it brightened them up. I may have lost some money, but I turned an irritated customer into a happy "ambassador" that will no doubt get me my investment back tenfold in the long term.

You and your client will probably hate this idea (especially if the customers are acting obnoxious, as it seems they are), but I would recommend trying to level with them. Make whatever their problem is better. If your client had done this earlier, it probably wouldn't have escalated to such an extent.

Here's the thing - they obviously feel wronged. Whether or not their woes are based in reality, it is your client's job to make them feel better. The customers don't care about your client's feelings, they don't care about his business reputation, they don't care that he might have tried to fix it earlier. Sounds harsh, but they shouldn't have to. They paid for a service and felt they didn't get they money's worth.

I can't recommend anything further until I know what the issue specifically is. Did they feel the quality of your client's service was less than expected? Issue a partial refund. Give them what they didn't get originally. Provide them with a gift voucher so they can try his services again at a discount, then wow the crap out of them. Easier to catch flies with honey than vinegar and all that.

Now, maybe these customers really are just crazy... and in that case, respond publicly about what went wrong, how your client tried to help and so on. At least then other potential clients will see that he tried to address things to the best of his abilities (damage control). But, really give a thought to whether or not he could make it better by dealing with them directly. If they're not making sense online, give them a call. The customers will likely be pleasantly surprised that he's trying to make things right.

Aside from selling PLR, my offline consulting is based on Reputation Management for local small businesses. I will PM you with my details. I wouldn't expect the legal battles to bring much success, and I wouldn't expect the review companies to agree to remove the bad reviews either even if it was possible to prove they were unjustified.

The whole idea of RM is to surpress the bad and promote the positive. There is a joke that I use on my twitter account a lot - "Where do you hide a dead body online? On the 3rd page of Google".

Your client needs to ensure that when customers are searching for his business what they are seeing first is the good, positive reviews and comments. Burying the negative several pages deep will keep it out of sight and out of mind.

Just get new positive reviews. Poorly written rants are likely to be ignored - especially if there are fresh new positive reviews out there.

Turn the reviews around, make sure you respond to them appropriately and offer some kind of incentive for them to change their mind about the bad review.

just delete their comments and end of the story
it would be bad if they actually told to more of your costumers the bad review
but if it was on the internet and it was your site
you can just delete the bad reviews

Just have someone Scrapebox blast the reviews into the Google sandbox :p