Attack of the Customers Biznology Webinar with Paul Gillin

In this 30‑minute Biznology webinar, host Frank Reed introduces speaker Paul Gillin, author of Attack of the Customers, who explains how social‑media critics can launch damaging attacks on brands and how companies can defend themselves. Gillin walks through several high‑profile case studies – the Pampers DryMax diaper controversy, the pink‑slime (lean finely textured beef) scandal, and the Bank of America debit‑fee protest – illustrating how consumer complaints spread via Facebook groups, Change.org petitions, and mainstream media, often outpacing corporate response. He categorises attackers into four archetypes (casual complainers, extortionists, committed crusaders, irritable influencers) and outlines distinct tactics for each. The webinar then presents practical tools for early detection (Google Alerts, Twitter trends, industry‑specific keyword monitoring) and a response playbook emphasizing proactive community engagement, transparent education, customer‑focused policies, empathy over apologies, and constant communication. Gillin stresses that smaller businesses are actually more vulnerable because review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor can dramatically affect revenue. In the Q&A, he advises brands to keep Facebook pages open for two‑way conversation and reiterates that both large and small firms must prepare for rapid, real‑time crises. The session concludes with a reminder to update crisis plans regularly and to prioritize listening, empathy, and factual communication.
Chapters
Hi everybody, and welcome to today's Biznology Digital Marketing Webinar. I'm Frank Reed, one of the bloggers here at Biznology. I'm the managing editor for the Marketing Pilgrim blog, which is currently number 10 on the Ad Age Power 150. I'm also the director of business development for the Edgeworks Group, a boutique interactive agency based in Irvine, California. Today we'll be hearing from Paul Gillen, a speaker, writer, and social media marketing strategist who will present Attack of the Customers: Why Critics Assault Brands Online and How to Avoid Becoming a Victim. But before we do, we need to recognize our sponsors. Barnraisers, which is a digital marketing and social media solutions company that builds brands using community and the proven principles of relationship marketing. Brick Marketing, Full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. We cut through the bull so you don't have to. Paul Gillen Communications. Paul is a popular speaker and award-winning author who can define the value and the pitfalls of social media in plain business terms. Unison, the unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. So as we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and will email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use your GoToWebinar controls to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your webinar controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of the webinar and pose them to Paul. So while we're waiting for the few last attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology newsletter and blog are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope you'll sign up now. So thanks again to all of you for spending the next 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Paul Gillen is an author and strategic advisor whose books, speeches, and hundreds of published articles have helped demystify social media for audiences across a wide range of industries. He's particularly interested in how social media is bringing new transparency to markets and creating more informed buyers. And luckily for you guys today, in fact, we're giving away 5 signed copies of Paul's book, Attack of the Customers. So you may be a lucky winner. Just a reminder, US attendees will receive a copy of the book while international winners will get an electronic version. So if you've ever struggled with how to avoid social media attacks against your brand, this is the webinar for you. So Paul, take it away.
Thank you very much, Frank. And hello everyone. Thanks for spending some time with us today. This is a topic that has interested me a great deal for a long time. Since my first book way back in 2007, The New Influencers, I was really captivated by the idea of social media actually to do bad. We hear a lot of talk about how great social media can be as a tool for marketers to promote their brands and their companies, but I was always fascinated by its destructive potential and thought that it would be interesting to devote a whole book to that and to look at some case studies and what we can learn from them. So I'm going to dive right into it with the diaper disaster. This is a disaster that hit Procter Gamble, certainly one of the great marketing brands in the world, about 3 years ago. An innovation they introduced to the market called Pampers DryMax, which was a new type of diaper that used an absorbent gel and was much thinner and lighter than previous Pampers. Pampers DryMax was hailed by Good Housekeeping magazine, by Bill Clinton. It won a number of awards. And Procter Gamble called it the biggest innovation for the Pampers brand in the last 25 years. However, Rosanna Shaw down in Louisiana didn't agree. She noticed that her daughter's skin was red and hot to the touch. And she believed that Procter Gamble had substituted a cheaper diaper for the Pampers that she had long come to trust. So she took her case to Facebook, which is where a lot of attacks happen these days. She set up a group called Pampers Bring Back the Old Cruisers Swaddlers and very quickly began to attract a groundswell of members. In fact, within 2 months of that group launching, this group was getting scores and sometimes hundreds of posts a day from people claiming all kinds of terrible things that Pampers had done to their baby, including causing chemical burns, including sending babies to the hospital. A whole conspiracy theory began to take hold in this site that Procter Gamble had actually introduced a cheaper diaper and tried to palm it off as Pampers. Every time a display changed in a store somewhere, it was taken as evidence of a stealth recall, and this quickly began to to spiral out of control. We had logos that were corrupted and used on this site and elsewhere, began popping up all over the web. And like I said, in some cases, hundreds of comments a day being posted that were critical of Procter Gamble. Now Procter Gamble was caught flat-footed by this, because they had tested this new Drymax diaper extensively. They were absolutely convinced it was safe. They had substantial evidence to that effect. But they couldn't do anything. And in fact, there was no scientific evidence to the contrary. But as you know, when a crowd mentality takes over, often facts are the casualty. So their team was frantically scrambling to counter the negative perception of this new product. And of course, this, if you understand in a marketing scenario, when you're doing a big rollout like this, a global rollout, having to take a significant amount of time to deal with critics can severely diminish the benefit of the rollout of the marketing plan. So this began to swell and to grow to mainstream media. You can even look today, if you look at Pampers Drymax diaper rash, you'll see all kinds of coverage from major publications. It was in every major publication, really, in the United States and some internationally, and eventually reached the Consumer Product Safety Commission. In the early summer of that year, this group, some members of this group petitioned the CPSC. The CPSC agreed to look into the charges of Pampers hurting these babies, and in September, CPSC released its findings that there were no link between Pampers and rashes. Interestingly, the activity in this Facebook group dwindled almost immediately, and today that Facebook group is still there. You can still find it. It, but it gets on the order of one update every couple of weeks now rather than hundreds per day. In fact, the Pampers brand, according to advertising agency, its sales actually were stronger after all of this because Pampers was ultimately vindicated and the brand awareness that was raised as a result of this campaign eventually worked to its benefit. One of the things that Pampers did, that P&G did that was so effective was it mounted a major blogger relations and education program. One of the brilliant, I think, moves that they made was aligning themselves with their critics by stating their disaster plan was to focus on the welfare of the children. They mounted a big education campaign. They brought bloggers, mom bloggers, to Cincinnati for a day of education. They brought the media in, and they really laid out the whole Pampers story, all of the chemistry behind Drymax. and did a complete transparency push to try to show that they had done all of the testing that could reasonably be expected of a company like P&G for a product rollout like this. In fact, what happened is that they ultimately increased the perception of P&G as a responsible company, and that worked to its benefit. But they sort of had to go through the valley of death to get there. Paul Fox, the Director of Corporate Communications at P&G, who really orchestrated the the crisis plan here said you can't join the community at a time of crisis. You have to already be invested in the community, and that requires the investment of people, time, and money. P&G has since become a very big fan of customer communities, in part because they understand now the impact that negativity can have. So the best way to head off negativity is to get involved with those communities before the problems begin. Today, This topic is so timely because there are so many channels of complaint today. As David Michael Michelle Davies of the Webby Awards says, there's never been a better time to be a critic. We have all kinds of different ways now to express our our frustration and our problems with customer service. We can take them to our blogs, Twitter, to Facebook, and to to many other places. And what we're finding is that many companies are actually getting or many consumers, and this applies to businesses as well, are getting better results by complaining in public channels than they are by going through standard accepted channels of customer service. This may be a bit of a Faustian bargain that companies make when they actually begin providing superior customer service through social media, but it really is where the market is heading right now. We've got a whole generation of consumers who are learning that complaining in public actually works. And it gets better results than complaining through the accepted channels. Social media crises have increased dramatically in the last few years, as documented in this research by Altimeter Group. Altimeter says companies are quick to deploy the latest social media technology, yet most have not prepared for the threat of crises. About 3/4 of the crises that they studied, they believe, could have been diminished or averted by better preparation. Another example that I'm sure many people are aware of happened about a year ago, and this was over the pink slime crisis. Now, pink slime is actually not nearly as bad as it sounds. Its real name is lean, finely textured beef, and it is beef trimmings that are recovered from— I won't go into the gory details here, but it's recovered beef trimmings that are cleansed and then are mixed in with ground beef. This has been done for over a decade. There has been some controversy about it, but the USDA long ago declared that pink slime was safe and in fact was actually nutritious. Yet that didn't stop an article that appeared in an online publication called The Daily in March of 2012 from charging that pink slime was not beef and that it was cleansed with ammonia and was actually hazardous. to your health. This very quickly swelled, thanks to a petition on a site called change.org, and you should all be familiar with change.org because it is becoming a very powerful amplifier for consumer complaints in particular. The groundswell started on change.org and quickly spread to mainstream media and all kinds of other channels. What you see here, and I apologize if this chart is a little bit difficult to make out, but on March 7th, ABC World News featured the first major mainstream news coverage of the pink slime crisis that quickly spread to calls by congressional leaders to stop using pink slime in school lunch program. A bunch of major grocers, as I'm sure you remember, pulled it from their products just a week later. And just a few days after that, the largest maker of lean finely textured beef, Beef Products Inc., suspended its operations in 3 states and idled 3/4 of its employees Just a week later, the food processor AFA, which is the second largest producer of this product, actually filed for bankruptcy. So you see all of this happened in less than one month, and this was driven primarily by a consumer backlash that started in a sort of innocuous publication and spread entirely through bottom-up channels. Now what was the role of the media in all this? And I think that's very interesting. We have traditionally relied upon the media to be the arbiters. They tell us what truth is, and they calm down uprisings like this. But in the case of pink slime, I think the media failed to do its job. It focused more on the complaints than it did on the science underlying the product. So you didn't see a lot of mainstream media coverage that said, hey, this product has been deemed safe, and the USDA has certified this product safe. For many years. In fact, in April of last year, the USDA did issue— reissue its findings that pink slime is safe. The mainstream media did not take that role, and I think that the depleted ranks of mainstream media caused by the crash of the newspaper industry and the depression in other mainstream media ranks has really sapped their ability to be the truth-sayers and the people who find out the story behind the story. Mainly mainstream media amplified the complaints and they focused on the bottom-up revolt by consumers rather than on the truth behind this problem. Weapons of choice, what do people use to start these campaigns these days? Facebook is a big one. The idea, if you had asked 5 years ago, if you had asked companies about the wisdom of creating a branded place where people could come and complain about them on their own branded space, they would have said you were out of your mind. But we do it all the time these days. Practically every major brand has a Facebook page, and those that enable comments by visitors are effectively inviting critics as well as fans. So, and then people can use Facebook to create groups very quickly that can spread awareness. Now in late 2011, you may remember that Bank of America was forced to withdraw a fee that it had begun to impose on debit card holders. This was actually driven by a young woman in Los Angeles and another young woman in Washington, D.C., both in their 20s, who were offended by the charges that they saw applied to their debit card accounts and began Facebook campaigns that quickly swelled out of proportion. Both of them received extensive mainstream media coverage. The woman Molly Catchpole out of DC, who was only 22 years old at the time, was covered on all the major networks cutting up her Bank of America debit cards and resulted in an 8-fold increase in new accounts at credit unions and savings and loans in that month. In fact, the chief executive of the Credit Union National Association said, I think we may look back in a few years and say this was the spark that caused a lot of people to say, yes, credit unions are a better deal. An 8-fold increase in credit union accounts in a single month driven by a groundswell protest against a major bank. By the way, just a month later, Molly Kotchpole was at it again, forcing Verizon to withdraw a fee that it imposed on customers who paid online. This one 22-year-old woman essentially stared down 2 very large companies all by herself using Facebook. Consumers, as we know, are increasingly in control. If you look at The Consumerist, which is one of many consumer advocacy sites and really probably the longest-lived and the most effective. A typical Consumerist day on Consumerist looks like this. These are all headlines from a single day on Consumerist. You can see that these are all major consumer brands that have been targeted by consumers who have had bad experiences. What Consumerist basically does is it solicits experiences from consumers and then it It checks them out a little bit, not necessarily a lot, and it posts their experiences. And then the brands are free to respond if they wish, but the idea is that Consumerist acts as a catalyst for a conversation, not necessarily as an arbiter of truth. Parenthetically, the Consumer Product Safety Commission is doing this now itself. The CPSC last year launched its own site that encourages consumers to do exactly what they do on Consumerist. They can post their complaints On the CPSC site, it is— the complaints are not edited, and then companies are free to comment and respond to them, but the CPSC suggests and executes no formal quality control. So it's really become kind of a giant free-for-all out there where people say whatever they want. And in some industries, this is changing industries fundamentally. If you have made a travel reservation in the last year using a website like TripAdvisor, or Yelp or TravelPod or Google Places or one of the many places online that you can get reviews, you can see that the hotels that are top-rated in their markets can do very, very well, and the hotels that are not are in a very deep hole. This is the Sofitel in Washington, D.C., the number 1 rated hotel in Washington, D.C. on TripAdvisor. You can see with 943 reviews— excuse me, number 2 ranked hotel This hotel doesn't have to do a lot of marketing. Its customers are doing the marketing for them. At the other end of the equation is the Motel 6 Washington, D.C. Convention Center with 9 reviews and comments like bed bugs. What do you do about that if you're the Motel 6? You can't really market your way out of that problem. You've got a quality control problem which is not going to be cheap or easy to fix. And we are seeing this spread into many other industries as well. Small businesses, restaurants, local services are increasingly beholden to services like Yelp, which render judgment by their customers on the quality of the products and services that they deliver. Let's look at the 4 kinds of aggressors that we identified for the book Attack of the Customers and really categorize them into these 4 areas. One is the casual complainers. This is the background noise of customer relations. Anybody who is in particularly consumer industry knows about casual complainers. They're the people who are always sort of griping, the constant stream of gripes about individual experiences that people have. They're not really a big problem. They merit listening to and they merit response if it looks like they have a legitimate beef. On the other hand, in certain industries like airlines, for example, constant complainers are simply a fact of life and there's very little that airlines can do about them. Casual complainers, I should say. Casual complainers, I should say. For these people, the best way to respond is through policies. You need good customer-oriented policies that make it possible for— that empower your employees to solve customers at the point of the problem. I should say, I want to stress here, customer-oriented policies. A lot of policies are not oriented toward customers. They're oriented toward protecting the company, and that can actually make customer complaints worse when they get a response that, oh, it's policy. The policy should be something that is oriented towards satisfying the consumer rather than protecting the company. Not a lot you can do about people like this except listen to them and look for patterns that may be developing that indicate a more systemic problem. The second type of aggressor is what I call the extortionist, and this is a very small group, thankfully, but it's a very annoying one because these are the people who try to hold businesses up with the threat of negative reviews. In 2011, some hoteliers in the UK accused TripAdvisor reviewers of blackmail, saying that they felt coerced, that customers were actually threatening bad reviews of their establishments if they didn't get room upgrades and discounts. This is, again, not a huge problem, but it's a very annoying one when it happens. The thing you need to do is don't give ground to these people. Do not do one-off deals with them because they'll tell others about it. These days, doing any kind of special discount or special coupon because someone complains is a risky option because there's always a chance that they'll tell other people and other people will come in and try to get the same deal from you. What you want to do is to give them— is to hold your ground. To state what your practices are, restate why your practices are fair, and don't give in to blackmail. If they do post that threatened negative review, be sure that you're on top of it so that you can respond to it and explain the interaction that you had with them. Deniability is really the strongest weapon against the extortionist. The third kind is a committed crusader, and this is Molly Catchpole and Kristen Christian and PETA, and all kinds of environmental groups that are committed, and are empowered, and they're very knowledgeable, and they have the means and the tools to take their campaigns very far. And these are really the most concerning kinds of critics, because they are committed and they will stick with it. They are not motivated by personal gain. Or financial reward. They are motivated by a higher calling, saving the environment, helping the cause of disadvantaged people, and they usually know their stuff, and they know their tools very well. These are the people that you— who won't go away. They are the people that you need to negotiate with, and you sometimes need to change your policies if they have a good cause to state. If their point is valid, you may have to look at making some changes in your policies, and Keep in mind that changing a bad policy is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, you'll get brownie points in many cases for revisiting policies that may not be sustainable or that may not make sense anymore. So provide facts and education to the market. If you are not ready to change your policy, if you don't think that change is merited, then be able to provide plenty of facts to the public. Do not get into debates or fights with these people on their Facebook pages or even your Facebook pages. I encourage you to use independent websites to set up fact websites and just the facts kind of outlets where you can state your side of the issue and make your case. You're not always going to come to agreement with these people. Sometimes you just have to learn to live with each other, but you do need to be able to Point to places where people can make informed decisions and understand your point of view. The fourth kind is what I call the irritable influencers, and these are the people who are everything from entertainers to politicians to athletes to even influential bloggers who like to throw their weight around. Kevin Smith had a memorable incident a couple of years ago with Southwest Airlines where he was denied a second seat on a plane to accommodate his rather. Rather large girth and he took that issue to Twitter and his podcast and made a big deal out of it. Southwest Airlines, to its credit, stuck to its guns and said, this is our policy. We do not give away seats to people because they happen to be overweight. If we did that, then we would have to do it— if we did it for one person, we'd have to do it for everybody. It was a reasonable comeback and eventually Kevin Smith backed down. The good thing about irritable influencers is that they usually eventually lose interest and they move on to other things. Is an attack brewing? Well, look for things like— there are free tools like Google Alerts, like Google Trends, like Twitter trending hashtags, like social media monitoring tools that will show you if there's a groundswell of opinion that's beginning to develop. You need to think about the terms that are going to be most important to you, to your industry, because it won't be the same for every industry. Of course, everyone here is subscribing to Google Alerts, right? You want to monitor Twitter for your name and for negative modifiers, words like sucks, like the hashtag fail, like the word hate. Look for frequent retweets of those adjectives as they're applied to your company, and especially by people who have a large following. Look for keywords that are relevant to your industry. In the PC industry, for example, blue screen, crash, won't start, overheating are all indications of problems that are really specific to that industry. And Dell Computer, which is really one of the leaders in this area, looks very closely when it rolls out a new product for terms like overheating and crash related to new products, because it can intercept problems before they become widespread and mandate a large-scale recall. They can do a small recall, much more affordable recall, if they see customers— these kinds of terms beginning to trend about their new products early in their life cycle. Be aware that everybody has a baseline of negativity. Even 20% of Apple customers are angry at Apple at any given point. Every company has critics, and people expect that, and they'll give you that. They'll allow that. What you want to look for is not to satisfy everyone. You want to look for growths in critics. You want to look for spikes in negativity that would indicate a problem is happening. You can't please everyone, nor should you try. You should make reasonable efforts to please people who have legitimate problems. But the trolls, the people who simply can never be pleased, you really can't do anything about pleasing them. Monitor the posts by others on the Facebook pages that you own. I encourage you to respond to those. Silence is not a good idea. Put an influencer relations program in place because when you need to get a message out to the market, often the grassroots influencers are the fastest way to do it. 8 essential truths just to close out here. Bad things happen to good companies all the time. In the book, we tell stories of some very fine companies— Nestlé, ChapStick, Progressive Insurance, Susan G. Komen Foundation, who have been the victim of major attacks. It's not bad practices necessarily. It may be one mistake. Ford came into— is currently dealing with the backlash of some ads that its agency posted in a competition that were of questionable taste. That doesn't mean Ford is a bad company. It means something bad happened in Ford's domain. Except that this happens to everyone. You don't have time to think anymore. You have minutes, in some cases, to respond to a crisis. Certainly hours at best. You don't have days anymore. Do not go silent. It is often the worst thing you can do. It's something that companies do a lot when the situation gets out of hand. You want to be talking a lot. This is classic crisis communications. You want to be educating people constantly. Never lie. Never assume that your words will be taken the way you expect them to be taken. Talk a lot and explain yourself constantly. Be aware— this is an interesting phenomenon— the media these days may also be the attackers. It used to be that we relied upon the media to be the source of truth. But today, who is the media? The media may be bloggers. There are some bloggers, there are some news blogs that have the kind of traffic that we once expected only for the media. And they may be your chief critics. So the media may be the ones who are attacking you, and that requires a different plan of action, certainly a good media relations program from the beginning. Be aware that attacks can come out of nowhere. They can be entirely unexpected, and that means you have to be listening on weekends as well. Nearly anyone can start one. And by the way, the fact that someone starts one doesn't mean it's going anywhere. You shouldn't be responding to every single critic out there, every single Change.org petition, every single negative comment on Facebook. What you want to look for is a pattern. And the early groundswell that indicates that an attack is going to go mainstream. Your solution may make the problem worse is simply restating what I said earlier. If you give away too much, if you bend the rules too much, be aware that everything gets shared these days. Every communication you have with your critics will be shared with others. And if you go too far in mollifying them, it may actually come back to bite you. Listen constantly. Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst. If you have a crisis communications plan that's more than 5 years old, throw it out. It doesn't work anymore. You've got a whole new set of media influencers you need to deal with, and the timeframes have changed completely. Are your policies customer-focused? L.L.Bean and Lands' End have these policies that any customer who's dissatisfied with their product at any time for any reason can return it for a refund or an exchange. What's the beauty of those policies? Nobody uses them. Almost nobody ever takes them up on that offer. But it avoids so much cost in the process. They don't have to adjudicate every single interaction with an aggrieved customer. They simply say, this is the policy and this is what we'll honor. And so customers go away happy. And the secret is that very few customers ever complain. Their costs of dealing with complaints are very low. Empathy matters more than apology. One of the interesting things we discovered writing the book is that The first knee-jerk reaction that most people have to an attack is to apologize. That usually is not what people want. What they want you to do is to listen and to hear them out and to show that you've listened. Apologizing, in fact, can make matters worse because it looks like you're trying to dodge them. So empathize and show them that you understand what they're saying, but don't automatically jump to the apology. Never make it personal. I think we know that. And always take the high road. That's never a bad idea for business. So I packed a lot into just a few minutes here, but I am rushing to an end here and I'm going to hand it back to Frank. I don't know if we have any time for questions, Frank, but certainly if we have any, I'd be glad to take them.
Thanks, Paul. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to avoid attacks on social media, but there are a couple of questions. I've got a few good ones teed up, and we'll take a few extra minutes to address those. I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask a question by typing into the questions box. Box on your GoToWebinar controls. Remember that 5 of you will receive signed copies of Paul's book, Attack of the Customers. We'll announce the winners after the questions, so be sure to stay until the end. Now before we get to the questions, we need to thank our sponsors again. We have BarnRaisers, a digital marketing and social media solutions company that builds brands using community and the proven principles of relationship marketing. Brick Marketing, a full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. Paul Gillen Communications. Paul, as you already know, is a popular speaker and award-winning author who can define the value and the pitfalls of social media in plain business terms. And then Unison, the Unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. So now real quickly, we're going to address a question, at least one, Paul, that I thought was a good one. Somebody asked, should you open up your Facebook page to allow others to post?
I really think you should. If you want to get the full value of Facebook, I think you should. Facebook is a conversational medium. It's a 2-way medium. If you use it as a fire hose, as another distribution channel, I don't think you're getting much value out of Facebook. Yes, you will protect yourself, but you also won't get people— people aren't going to come to your page if you don't have the opportunity to interact there. There are a lot of brands that do this. There was a study by A.T. Kearney last year that found that only about half of the top 50 brands were engaging at all on Facebook. You can use Facebook that way, but I just don't think you're getting much value out of it.
Great, and then one other quick question. Is this something that's mainly— you just talked about a lot of larger companies. Is this something that would Is this something that mainly larger companies should be concerned about, or do smaller companies have these issues as well?
I think it's actually a bigger problem for smaller companies, and I devoted a couple of slides to Yelp and TripAdvisor. There are lots of other businesses, small businesses, that are increasingly beholden to these review sites. Yelp in particular has become a real flashpoint for a lot of small businesses. You know, everything from restaurants to dry cleaners to to the corner store because their businesses can be significantly impacted by Yelp ratings. So a lot of negativity on Yelp, there are studies that have demonstrated there is a correlation between negativity on Yelp and damage to small businesses. You need to be vigilant about what people are saying to you there. Now conversely, good ratings on Yelp can be a gusher of business for you, but a lot of small businesses are struggling with how to cope with this phenomenon right now.
Okay, great. Well, we want to be respectful of time here. We're a little bit past 11:30, so what we're going to do, any other questions we'll take care of and you'll get an email answer. Yeah, thank you. That's all we have for today. All right, well, thanks to Paul. Thank you, Paul, for the great ideas, and thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. It's actually time now to announce the attendees who will receive the autographed copies of Paul's books. Paul's book. Sorry about that. Paul is not giving away all of his books, just one, Attack of the Customers. And the winners are Cynthia Fishel, Brian Nye, Thomas Gregerson, Nancy Rago, and Kevin Thomas Tully. So congratulations to all of our winners, and you'll receive confirmation emails shortly. If any of you had any questions that we didn't have time to answer, you can email your questions to Eileen. That's eileen@mikemoranngroup.com, and she'll be sure to get it to Paul for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of the webinar to listen to again, and please share it with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, which will be Pinterest Marketing 101. That is scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern time on May 14th. Thank you, everybody. We appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you in May. Take care. Thank you.










