Practice Management MARCH 2014 | Oral Health Office | oralhealthgroup.com 40 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 ONLINE REPUTATIONS: