A Negative for Venue Marketers
By Reception Search on April 7, 2010
User Generated Content - A Negative for Venue Marketers
After a successful reception, many brides will often put pen to paper and personally thank all her wedding reception suppliers.
However, brides are notoriously difficult to please.
If a bride is not happy with a venue's staff, food or facilities this generation's internet savvy women turn to internet forums and free restaurant listing websites that allow visitors to post comments or (UGC)user generated content.
These days it is as simple as pulling out an iphone in order to vent online whilst totally in the moment.
The free listing websites and wedding directories use your company name and details in order to attract site visitors. So when someone enters a venue name into Google sometimes the first thing to come up is a free listing with negative comments about the establishment in question.
Free restaurant listing websites that rely on User Generated Content in order to increase their pages and words in Google do their client's (the listings) a disservice by allowing negative opinions about venues to be promoted on the internet so easily.
A venue's busines can be ruined for years by malicious comments being posted.
We have heard of directories that refuse to remove the negative comments from their website when a venue has requested it.
receptionsearch.com.au does not support the use of UGC and will not allow unauthorised comments about venues to be published and promoted online.
We suggest that you attempt to remove your 'free listings' from websites who use this method of increasing content before you company's reputation is ruined.
There are always 2 sides to a story
If your venue has a negative comment on the internet that you are not able to get removed from a free restaurant or wedding directory, contact us and publish your side of the story in our article section.
We has heard of a venue who thinks that their negative comments were posted by a disgruntled part-time worker who had a run-in with the venue manager over working hours. She has explained her suspiscions to the free listing website in question, only to be told that there is nothing they can do and they even refuse to remove the listing all together when asked.
Here is an example of a negative story about a wedding reception we found published on a newspaper website. We have removed reference to the venue in question but hope it serves to illustrate how dangerous the internet can be for negative PR. This article we suspect would have been submitted to the editor of the website and therefore would have been approved prior to posting. However, if an article is written in an entertaining manner and has an eye-catching headline it can get published. It just goes to show the lengths an ex-client will go to in order to tell a negative story about a venue.
The receptionsearch.com.au Team