The Other Side of Negative Reviews

Meryl K. Evans recently wrote an interesting article regarding negative blogging and small businesses.  In it she argues that criticism is sometimes merited and that anonymity allows the true lashing some companies deserve. But what if credibility is needed over anonymity?  What happens when your negative review of a company is to help out the greater good?  I ran into just that situation not too long ago.

My family was living in an apartment complex in Temple Terrace, Florida and the crime there was escalating rapidly.  Having been in a worse situation before in another state I decided to use the tools at hand, blogs, to stop others from making the mistake we did.

I wrote a scathing article about the apartment complex on my family blog.  I know it stopped a few people from even looking at the mentioned apartments because they contacted me thanking me for my candor.  However, two years after the fact, the management of the complex decided to build up their online presence and stumbled across my article.  Since the article ranked very well on Google (I have a knack for that) they were very worried about the 100% honest negative feedback.  Also, when you throw in the fact that I sacrificed anonymity to give the article more credibility it led to them contacting me.

Here’s an excerpt from the e-mail they sent me:

Please remove the comments in regards to Doral Oaks off your home website.  It is from 2004 and not good for our business.  It would be much appreciated.

The Doral Oaks website is the intellectual property of AIMCO and you are not authorized to make use of this property through linking or other means?

At the time they sent me the e-mail (two years after the article being published) there were no cases where linking to a web site was considered a semi-criminal act.  Linking is what builds the web and my response was quite simple:

I’m sorry.  I’d really like to help you but it’s not going to happen.

If they would have done their job to begin with then there wouldn’t have been a need for the article to have been written.  There also wouldn’t be a need for that article to still exist almost three years later.  It may seem mean and cold but I endured enough to merit the negative review I had given and it is against my principles to have my freedom of speech limited by anyone.  They threatened me with legal action and I paid it no attention at the advice of an intellectual property lawyer a blogging friend referred me to.

Meryl asked the question what a small business is supposed to do with negative feedback.  Usually, that negative feedback boosts overall popularity which was not the case in my situation.  But, the apartment complex used the tools they had at their disposal to make the negative review go away.  So far, that plan has back fired for them, the negative feedback remains (ranked #5 on Google when you search for the name of the apartment complex) and there is a flustered blogger standing by his principles.

[tags]negative review, negative blogging[/tags]