My experience with a 'negative review' scammer.
westiseast.co.uk
westiseast.co.uk
I would worry about reviews like, "ordered, never received product, called owner and he told me to 'fuck myself with a pointy stick'". That is significantly more damning, since it reads like an account of a factual event, rather than an uninformed opinion.
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A house getting robbed isn't 'small stuff', and is in no way comparable to getting a bad customer review.
This guy (Brian) at the end admitted that he did what he did just because he was unfollowed in twitter. What a guy!
A few weeks later, after they'd started up and the dust had settled, I had a look at their Twitter page. "Following: 0." The cheeky gits had followed everyone, got a bunch of followers in return, and then deleted us all! That was enough to lose them a significant amount of goodwill from me and I promptly unfollowed them.
Just as there are people who cut you up on the road or hit people for no reason in real life, there are people who'll randomly try to ruin your day with seemingly no motivation (even some people on HN!). Keep your head held high, gracefully conduct yourself, and let them enjoy steeping in their own bile (ooh, a tea joke!)
He seems unable to maintain eye contact with the camera and his gaze darts around. She seems agitated and keeps desperately staring at him.
I don't encourage anyone here to watch and increase their ad impressions. But in summary, they don't look like people you would ever want to spend time with voluntarily.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/yelp-sued-for-alleg...
I don't know much about yelp, and don't use it much, but have generally been led to believe that they are a good company (admittedly, by the tech press) so it'll be interesting to hear if you have actual examples of people getting scammed.
Sometimes it gives me a more favorable view of the company in question, actually.
The only time I really pay attention to stuff like this is when there is a bunch of negative reviews and the company never responds to any of them.
The hotel in question was overall reviewed quite favorably. There where a few complaints, notably that two of the bungalows where very loud, or about the restaurant. Essentially quite small fry.
For each of those complaints the management took the time to address the specific issues, acknowledging specific problems and indicating how they intend to fix them.
This convinced me to book and I didn't regret it at all.
There is a big difference between boilerplate bullshit of the "your call is very important to us" variety and taking complaints seriously, responding to them on an individual basis and really trying to make it right.
That's often quite visible from how a company handles complaints.
BTW: The noisy bungalows where no more when I stayed there.
Fear should never dictate the decision process. They need to be reported.
It is the same as arguing with idiots, as the old saying goes: they will drag you down to their level then "win" through a mix of experience and perseverance. (please note: this is a general comment, I'm not intending to call you an idiot at all here!). I dealt with bullies as lot in earlier life and random fools on the Internet are absolutely no different (aside from getting their apparent confidence due to relative anonymity rather than size of fighting experience). Sometimes ignoring them is the best policy for all (though, of course, use your judgement).
Of course if they are causing appreciable damage, the picture is different. And don't just report them to twitter. If they are trying to extort money from your business, report them to the relevant legal authority (if one is clear, this unfortunately can be difficult to determine).
I fear you've reached the wrong conclusion. Haters gonna hate, and there is no way you can answer them all. The more you sell, the more crazy people will be among your "customers" and some of them will have a bad day and take it out all on your tea and you. The victory over one hater may make you happy for a day, but you can't scale it.
Focus on encouraging public praise from your happy customers.
http://twitter.com/#!/FoodBlogTeaShow/status/966666235864719...
and here's another from 14 hours ago:
http://twitter.com/#!/FoodBlogTeaShow/status/981033271197696...
I can't tell if that second one is supposed to be sarcastic or not.
So he insulted the tea itself (which he hasn't even tried) because he was unfollowed on Twitter. That's illegal and you can send him a cease or desist letter telling him to unpublish any unfounded slander. However, just carry and selling your tea any ignore this douche bag.
Part of the blog post was about setting the record straight, and part of it was also to remind other people in similar situations they're not alone when this kind of thing happens. It's effectively bullying, and the worst part of bullying is suffering in silence.
I'd like to think if anyone ever tried to do that to me, I'd be replying back with a response 10x fold.
Suppose I was to stumble across an argument like that about any product/startup/business/whatever I'll almost certainly believe the one who argues in good grammer, without spelling mistakes and without vulgar tones. I think you did the best one can do.
is not exactly a position of great influence.
In this case the information is arguably very relevant, but I hope it isn't used generally for all users as it's a biased metric for judgement of quality.
Quality information is not always popular.
By the way, I need to try that stuff. Cheers from Hong Kong.
Right now, there isn't any easy way to defend against it.
I doubt he has one, and our laws are very strict about scamming. The keyword here is "Abmahung", which can become very expensive ..
And in fact they violate the German law about telemedia. http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tmg/__5.html Just an email adress and no phone number, no registrar of companies or entry in the commercial register in Germany and I'm very sure the admin won't be able to reply in German.
This means they will have to pay for the Abmahnung/warning from a lawyer between 800 and 1.000 € or if they don't provide the information within a given time a fee of 50.000 € for violating § 16 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 TMG (TMG = telemedia law).
The German law doesn't tolerate "unavailable" internet commerce.