[...] doing all your [negative] publicity for free!
I am not taking a standpoint, merely interested in some of the thoughts shared in this thread. Much seems to be based on personal opinion not on actual knowledge per se. Right, with your statement above I disagree. Free publicity through negative exposure is an offline (read: old) thought and does not apply to the web. It never has. It never will. Again, it portrays a clear misunderstanding of online marketing.
Very simple reasoning. The reach of one dissatisfied customer is many, many more time powerful using digital media. Example, I am a newbie interested in meeting like-minded. Where do I go? Search engine. Where else would I go? One you have the challenge to compete on search terms which are highly competitive for both natural and commercial rankings (i.e. investment required either cost of effort to get your code set up or purchase expensive keywords).
Two, more importantly, you are also competing with for example review and community sites. These, based on the Google algorithm, are perceived as independent and will receive a higher score on certain variables in the algorithm leading to a automatic higher ranking in the search results. As such, the exposure of negative customer comment has not only a huge reach on the web, new customers are also likely to be exposed to this negative publicitity. Customer behaviour on the web has learned us that the probability that customers opt for a competitor is far greater compared to chosing the company under scrutany. Obviously it is important for the 'negative' exposure to be a objective as possible, and not based on emotive personal reasons.
Point is, you may be able to retain your current customer base, hoewever, any acquisition of new customers will be negatively impacted, consequently your revenue growth through PPC may suffer, ultimately your profits may decline. This is in the online world an area of PR called SERM, search enginge reputation management. There are some counter measures you can take. One you can push positive customer stories or attack ungrounded negative exposure legally, and obviously you can market through neutral sites and ultimately buy a stack of backlinks. Regardless, if will cost you, cost of effort or money.
Another useful piece of information here is that many leading brands measure there site performance through something called advocacy score. We dont only look any more at user satisfaction, goal completion rates, et al. and have discarded long time ago traffic measurement as primary KPI, those are useful for site development. The advocacy score tells us the extent to which a visitor will actively promote/advocate the brand to others, online and offline based on their experience on online channels, be they .com or localised .com's, online stores or social platforms. There is a statistically significant link between this score and profitability both through online sales as well as offline, and the root cause analysis allows us to improve the overall site experience and make business decisions.
