Practice Management

March 2014 | Oral Health Office | oralhealthgroup.com

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s an avid marketer of my dental practice, I some-times Google my name and specific keywords to see what comes up and where I rank. Over the last few weeks, I noticed two negative reviews on consumer rating sites.

In the past, when a patient had left a negative review, my staff and I would quickly go through the schedule and charts to see if we could iden-tify the patient. However, our last two were somewhat different, in that the reviewer was very specific about their experience and alleged that our positive reviews were “fake.” Imme-diately, I had our staff go through all of the charts over the last few months and try to recall the patient and the situation. I wanted to ensure that if we had done something wrong or did not handle the situation to the patient’s satisfac-tion, that we are at least able to take corrective action; if not for that specific patient then for our future patients.

As many businesses do, we invest a lot of time and money into our marketing and provide the best service that we can. But the irony is that the more we expose our business to the market, the more susceptible we become to these types of reviews which can be counteractive and, person-ally, quite bothersome. The unfortunate part is that once it is up online, it is there permanently.

It was not until a few days ago that things appeared much clearer to me. I was on my way to a meeting in New Orleans and had a stop-over in Atlanta where I ran into an old friend who owns multiple brand name hotels all over the United States. We started talking about his business and how the hotel industry has become a very compet-itive and saturated market — just like dentistry.

He shared with me that he recently hired a new Director of Communications, who came from another hotel chain, and since hiring him sales had gone up. His job was to stay on top of hotel review sites, thank people for posting their positive experiences and address any nega-tive experiences from the management side. He informed me that by having more postings and responses, the major search engines will start to rank the hotel higher in consumer searches; making it easier for people to find his hotels over others. What he told me next blew me away. His new Director of Communications was also responsible for leaving negative comments for competitor hotels. I was stunned and could not believe that he would be involved in such an unethical and deceptive practice. His response was that he did not even know about it until his Director of Communications had told him and that it is a very common practice in his indus-try. Recently, a gentleman named Peter Hook, who describes himself on Twitter as “director of propaganda” for Accor hotels in Asia and the Pacific, was caught publishing a number of crit-

The internet’s dirty little secrets and how it can kill your practice!

Neil Gajjar

OnlineReputatiOns:

oralhealthgroup.com | Oral Health Office | March 2014

41Practice Management

ical reviews about the company’s rivals. Now things started to make sense to me. I decided to do some more research on the topic, specifically in the dental industry.

Reviews on most sites are unverified, meaning anyone can create an identity and post an expe-rience. Amazon.com is such a massive ecom-merce player where anyone can leave a review on any product. Some popular sites say that suspi-cious reviews are investigated; others claim they have software to detect automatic postings, and RateMD.com claims that they track IP addresses so that the same user is unable to continuously post positive or negative reviews. Regardless of any anti-fraud measures, there are many ways around it. People can stoop to using multiple usernames and can post from different locations to prevent using the same IP.

Studies have shown that a one point increase on a five point scale can command up to nine percent increase in revenues for businesses (Harvard Business Review). However, in this new world of online marketing and the ‘power consumer reviews,’ it has resulted in a new kind of business around Reputation Management. Some of these companies offer to pay people $5 for every fake review they write, while oth-ers just have a team of writers overseas that are just churning out fake consumer reviews. The latest being caught and fined in this practice are a number of companies in New York. A total of 19 firms collectively agreed to pay more

than $350,000 in fines and stop posting bogus online reviews touting clients using a Bangla-desh company to write fake reviews, being paid from $1-$10 per review (USA TODAY). On Freelancer.com, there are 200+ ads for people to produce fake reviews for sites.

Georgios Zervas, coauthor of a recent study “Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competi-tion, and Yelp Review Fraud,” concluded that at least 16 percent of the reviews are fake.

Most people are not aware that posting false reviews is against the law. It is also very difficult to track and has become a new type of crime where ‘reputation’ companies can make millions driven by corporations who want to increase their bottom line. According to Scheiderman Edward Telmany, US Coachways’s chief execu-tive, “We get bashed online, we are losing money from this.” Telmany told his employees to write favorable reviews and posted a five-star review himself on Yelp that began: “US Coachways does a great job!”

Another misleading practice that has come up in the dental industry is one where a com-pany has set up an online review site for prac-titioners in which mainly negative reviews are posted. If you contact the company for verifica-tion of these reviews, you likely will not get a response back. However, you may be contacted by an Online Reputation management company offering to have the comments removed for a fee. It has come to light that most of these manage-