So here’s the secret. You can’t.

You knew that was coming, didn’t you? But there are ways to push the complaint farther away from your site and out of your search results.

The first thing I would do. Go after that customer, face to face, and see if you can correct what happened. Now some people would say that there are people who are never going to be happy, no matter what you do.

I would disagree and say, “You really don’t know that until you are face-to-face with that person.”

Too many times I’ve seen emails and comments start flaming because when it comes to digital communication it is easy to forget there is another human being on the other end of that discussion. It’s almost like we are flipping mad at our computer and just letting them have it. But once they are in person or on the phone, the anger settles and people can talk in the right TONE to one another.

The other thing to do is to go to those sites that have your complaint and explain your side of things. Tell them how you’ve tried to work this situation out.

But if you can’t fix it, you can out-content them on search results.

If you have only one website on the internet (your singular web presense) on the internet, this is going to be very hard. Because you essentially have only one link or two links that will come up when there is a search for your company.

But if you have multiple web presences…say a YouTube Channel, a Flickr account, a Twitter account, an outside blog or multiple blogs, a facebook page, a myspace page, then you have a chance.

Now what I would do is start pushing lots and lots of content out on the web through these different channels – and there are a heck of a lot of more of them than I mentioned.

Also, don’t do it all at once. Space it out. Get stuff up there at least once a week.

Other things you can do is change your static site frequently. I don’t care if it costs you money because you built a site without a CMS. By not changing your content, it just sits there and Google has no reason to re-index your site.

Get involved in other people’s conversations on their sites. If you are scared of the internet, then talk to someone who understands it and can help you.

The bottom line is get more active on the internet and you can drive them down on the search results.

This is also not a great idea in theory – I’ve done this before with companies. It does work. But make sure you understand this. The same rules that apply to you, also apply to the consumer and that’s why when you step it up – they can as well. So it’s better to just work it out together and not go through this mess.

Good luck. And if anyone else has some ideas on how to do it, let me know. I would love to hear them.

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This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to speak to a group of the most enthusiastic members of Indiana’s blogging community at Blog Indiana 2008 at IUPUI’s amazing new Campus Center. My topic was “Between the Posts” (which I admittedly have plenty of experience with) and it centered on using social media to connect people around your ideas, thoughts, posts, and so on.

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How much do you really know about how the food you eat is produced?  If you’re like most Americans, it’d be safe to assume not too much.  This weekend, I had the pleasure of speaking about digital and social media to the Young Farmers of the Indiana Farm Bureau as part of their annual leadership gathering.

While animal activists and environmental groups have taken advantage of these tools, most family farmers are just becoming aware of them.  Because rural areas lag behind urban areas with their internet connectivity, broadband is not as prevalent for many farm families.  Not surprisingly, this has placed them at a disadvantage with far more content being produced by those with agendas at odds with the average farmer.  A simple search of YouTube or Google with phrases like “hog facility”, “pork farm”, and “factory farms” can verify this.

During my presentation, someone suggested I search for the YouTube video entitled “Truth about Modern Pork Production”, which was produced by Chris Chinn, a former national president of Young Farmers.  She and her husband made the video themselves to tell their side of the story.  With over 3,100 views, it came up second when I searched “pork farm” on YouTube.

What I love about the video is how Chris presents the family farmers’ perspective with a highly authentic production.  No cue cards, no fancy editing, no fancy graphics.  Just a real person talking with real passion about how her family and she take great care of their animals and farm.  

In searching YouTube, you can also find videos made by the Ohio Pork Producers Council on the Ohio Pork Tour channel.  These are most definitely professional productions and feature real people talking mostly from scripts.  While they have an air of authenticity, I didn’t find them to be as engaging of the home production.  You can see their website that contains the hi-res videos and other information. 

As we continued with my presentation, we found a number of great blogs written by farm families shedding light on daily life on a farm.  I recommend checking out Nature’s Harmony Farm, “a family owned, pasture-based, local-market sustainable farm.”  Also, you can work up a good appetite drooling over the recipes at Farmgirl Fare, as well as see plenty of cute animal photos.  Another fun one is Season Eatings Farm, which includes posts on their daily lives and has great photos.

My guess is that these blogs and videos are just the tip of the iceberg that’s possible once more family farms get rolling with the power of today’s internet.

What do you think are some good ways for family farms to tell their story using digital and social media?

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Want to sharpen your social and digital media skills?  Want to learn from some great MediaSaucers?  Join Sarah Robbins, Don Schindler, and Mitch Maxson at this weekend’s BlogIndiana here in Indianapolis on the IUPUI campus.

For anyone who’s blogging, wants to blog, or deciding if blogging is a good idea, here’s your opportunity to soak in the collective knowledge being shared in 25 different sessions.  For just $49, you’ll be able to connect with a wide variety of perspectives and learn from real world experiences, including Barack Obama’s national blog editor.

We congratulate the IU School of Informatics, Compendium Blogware, and all the other sponsors for bringing together the state’s first blogging conference.  Looking forward to see you there!

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Thank you to everyone who attended the August 5 “The Power of User-Generated Content” event we held in Indianapolis.   We had over 90 people come together to learn about and experience how social media is changing the landscape for all types of businesses and organizations.  

Do you want to experience the event for yourself, even if you didn’t attend?  Great, you’re in luck.  

We encouraged everyone who attended to use social media to help us create a digital mosaic of the morning.  By using cameras, cell phones, and laptops with wifi, anyone could upload photos, blog, Twitter (microblog), and add their thoughts directly to the event’s Google site.  See it for yourself:

• Flickr Stream - photos taken and uploaded by various people who attended the event.  To get photos to flow thru the stream, everyone tagged their photos with “sauceugc”.  
• Twitter Stream - I enjoyed watching the various comments being made about the event.  It started with those of us attending, but then it quickly attracted people outside of the event.  If you start here, you can work your way in time order to see how the “back channel” conversations transpired.  It’s almost like getting a play-by-play and color commentary at the same time.
• Presentation Slides - you can view and print off the slides we used via this Google document.  
• Our Google Site - To bring all of these strands together, we created a very basic Google site.  While it’s not the most appealing design, you can see how simple tools can make a big impact.  
• External Blogs - Anyone who is passionate about a topic or wants to share their perspective can do so with the world.  We were glad to have Ryan Crozier join us and even more pleased to know he had a good experience.  Check out his blog and see how we made sure to say thanks.  If we had someone blog negatively about us, we would have made sure to reply and share our perspective – whether that was to acknowledge a shortcoming or explain more clearly the point we were trying to make.  

The best thing about all these tools is that they’re easy-to-use and available to anyone.  Just what every revolutionary and evangelist loves to know.  

So how do you make sure these powers are used for good, not evil?  The key is having a solid strategy for how your organization is empowering your customers, clients, employees, friends, allies, etc. to use them to help share your story.  Without a strategy, you’ll be at the mercy of more organized, more passionate, and more driven people.

What advice and experiences do you have to share on how UGC can be harnessed to grow your organizations?

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So they got you…one of your customers had a bad experience and now they are online telling the world about it.

In fact, they are so upset that they started a website or blog up and are actively denouncing your company. You went out and did a Google search and they are popping up on the same page as your website.

There’s your company and then right below it, bam. It’s that customer…the one that is really, really mad.

Well, how do you fix it so this guy isn’t second on the list behind your good name?

Unfortunately, most of the business people I talk to think that the customer is in the wrong. That it isn’t their fault and that they did the right thing. But it isn’t really about right or wrong when it comes to the damage a customer can cause to your online presence.

It’s about turning that customer into someone who loves you no matter the initial cost.

That’s crazy talk. No, not for a small business or even a large one.

I believe all you have is customer service. Today almost anyone can do what you do for your customers. The biggest difference between you and your competitors is how you treat them before, during and after they do business with you.

Everyone knows it’s 5x, 7x, 10x more expensive to get a new customer than it is to keep an old one.

And you believe that then you’ll do what it is to keep that customer happy no matter how insane you may think they are. But believe me, they aren’t insane in their own head. Make it right.

I’ll give you two examples that happened to me this weekend. One was at a sushi restaurant. I won’t mention the name because I didn’t feel that slighted but my wife sure did.

We had never been there before and had a coupon from a mailer. We walk in and there was no hostess. We waited and waited and waited. At least three or four minutes.

A large crowd of five or six came in behind us. They passed us, went to the bar. The hostess then came out from around the bar, greeted those people then came up to the hostess stand, grabbed some menus, gave us an apologizing look and said, “I’ll be right with you.”

She sat those people and then came back to us.

She greeted us. My wife said, “Did you know those people? Do they own the restaurant?”

The young girl said no. My wife said, “We were here before them. Why did they get seated before us?”

She didn’t have an answer. My wife likes things to be fair. This tainted the entire experience. We left and the people behind us who had just walked in left as well. So the very young hostess (who is your first impression for a new restaurant) just cost the owner $100 from us and probably $200 from the four top behind us.

Plus we’ll never go back. You only get one chance with my wife.

The next place we went to was brand new. A burger place with brew. I was excited. We walked in to a mop bucket unattended next to the front door. Yeah, we didn’t even look at the menu.

Two small businesses. Lost revenue. And we’ll never go back. And my wife who is at WOM machine will be very happy to pass her complaints along any time anyone mentions those two new restaurants.

So the fact that you have a customer that is unhappy and willing to talk about it online is both a very good thing and a very dangerous thing. Good because at least they are talking in an environment where you could deal with it. Like those restaurants will probably never know that my wife is hurting their business.

But onine is more dangerous than you can imagine because there are plenty places to talk (social media) outside of your site – especially if your site doesn’t even allow for that type of interaction. You know because you don’t want people talking bad about you on your site.

Here’s what one of our creative directors said about people talking negatively on your company’s site. Leigh Marino (awesome smart creative) likened those upset customers to her new puppy. This puppy liked to dig. Every time they were outside in the yard, the puppy tore up her flowers and her garden. After a couple of times at this, Leigh decided to make a space in the yard for the puppy to go to town on. A spot to rip her yard to shreds. Now the puppy was happy because he was going to rip something to shreds anyway and Leigh was happy because it wasn’t her flowers.

The idea behind this is that you are not going to make every customer completely happy. But when they do have a complaint, let them come to you and tell you about it. Let it be on your website for others to see. Then do what you can to contact this customer and make them happy. When you finally do, they will retract or if they don’t, you can let others see how you responded to the complaint and how you made amends.

But if you don’t do anything and you let that person have a voice out there on the internet without any response, the damage can be desvastating to a business.

Consumers are starting to understand this more and more. They know that their opinion of you counts more than just who they can reach in their small network of face to face friends. They can reach every single one of your customers searching for you on the net if they are smart enough about it.

Here’s some places they can do it.

• http://www.ripoffreport.com/
• http://consumerist.com/
• http://www.complaints.com/
• http://www.pissedconsumer.com/
• http://www.thesqueakywheel.com/

If it were me, I would start a free blog on blogger or wordpress to talk about what happened. I would use a URL that had their name in it. I would use the company’s name over and over to make sure the keywords were there. I would link my blog to all the sites above and anything else I could find. I would contact the local media and pitch my story to them. This stuff would probably take me a week but I’ll bet you I’d be showing up really close to their direct searches in Google. Heck, I might even buy a few adwords to make sure I did.

Sending me a cease and desist or taking me to court would be the wrong thing to do here. That would cause me to flame even louder on the net. Then my fellow bloggers would get wind of “the man” coming down on someone who is just trying to right a wrong. Then it would spread like wild fire.

Hopefully, you are seeing my point about how effective this type of consumer complaint can be and how you should be prepared to deal with it. I’m going to say it again. Make it right. And make sure everyone they talked to knows you made it right.

Next time, I’m going to write about how you can get that consumer complaint website off certain search results for your company. It takes some time and some effort but you can do it.

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In the past week, I have had meetings with prospective and current clients about the need to engage with the self-organized swarms.  Fortunately, we’re holding a special event today entitled “The Power of User-Generated Content”.  If you’re unable to attend, come visit the Google site we’ve created to showcase different collaboration and social media tools that your clients/members/employees are using to talk about you: http://sites.google.com/site/ugcevent/.   

More to follow.

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I had been wrestling with how to write about the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market for over a month.  Just a written blog entry would pale in comparison to the experience I had.  Ideally, I thought a sharp video piece would do the trick.  One hitch: I only had photos.

It was only when I watched a video posted by Fred Wilson at A VC blog of a bike ride he took in France that I knew what I needed to do.  His blog was the first time I found out about Animoto, a video production company based in New York and San Francisco that has created a software application capable of creating unique video productions using still photographs and a library of music.  

Wanna know the best thing?  It’s free for 30-second productions and just $3 for “full-length” (read: up to 3 minutes).  Even better, you can have unlimited remixes of each production without paying anything extra.  Here are three versions of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market:

Version 1 | Version 2 | Version 3

After I finished that, I made three versions of another video using photos I took on a trip thru Japan in 2005:

Version 1 | Version 2 | Version 3

So if you want to feel like a Hollywood director, but don’t have the technical skills to produce impressive video productions, I highly recommend Animoto.  Even if you do, it’s a great tool for creating great videos in a short amount of time with little work on your part.  

Not only do you get the videos, Animoto has done a great job of making it easy for you to share your full-length videos in a wide variety of social media spaces (Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, etc.)

Check it out for yourself and let me know what you think by posting a reply.

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