Case Study: How a Forum Post Almost Brought Down a Business
A client came to use with a single negative, a forum post from an unhappy customer saying the company had cheated him out of his money and didn’t deliver what they promised. This roofing company was a new company in the area and was starting to gain some traction in the marketplace. This forum post caught the attention of a writer at the local newspaper (city population was under 100,000). The newspaper writer was looking to hire a roofing company when she saw the forum post. This newspaper writer wrote an expose on this company highlighting the “facts” purported by this customer.
This problem of a single forum post lead to an article in the local newspaper, which was then picked up by a few local bloggers and there are now 6 negative listings on the front page when you search for the roofing company by name.
Our approach was simple 3-step approach.
- Have the company identify the unhappy customer and see if the company can make amends.
- Build good websites and pages to replace the negative listings on the first page.
- Build links from our private network of sites to push the newly created sites onto the first page.
With 7 weeks we had 9 of the first 10 spots, and after 11 weeks, we had the full 10 spots. The roofing client didn’t like all of the content, so he rewrote some of it and we published it so they content looked exactly the way the owner wanted it to look.
Lessons to learn – Treat customers right. Realize that not everyone will be happy. Don’t let unhappy customers ruin your business.