It doesn’t take much to generate a bad review on a site like Yelp. In fact, for businesses with heavy customer traffic, whether online or at a physical storefront, it’s really a matter of time before something happens that rubs someone the wrong way. The unfortunate aspect of this new dynamic is that a negative review is a negative review; whether the person posting it is has a legitimate beef or not. So how should you handle a negative review?

Managing your online reputation can be challenging enough without putting up your own posts that anger half of your existing and potential customers. Such is the case when starting or participating in controversial threads on social media sites like Facebook and other social media sites.

Reputation management problems can originate from an almost unlimited variety of sources including those that are started by the people inside a company. A recent example of a company starting its own reputation management firestorm comes from a small company in Livingston, Montana named Wilcoxon’s Ice Cream. Started in 1912, the company has intentionally kept a virtually invisible profile with the media for entirety of its existence.

While organized efforts along the lines of corporate espionage to damage a competitor’s reputation do occur, the vast majority of reputation management headaches are simply the result of the honest complaints from unsatisfied consumers.

The initial reaction to a complaint or a negative review targeting your business can make the difference between a situation that gets handled quickly and one that necessitates the reputation management cavalry to ride to the rescue. While negative content pointed at a business can easily be taken as a personal affront, responding in a defensive manner is a sure way to put yourself in a position that requires a lot more time and energy than would otherwise be spent to get to a point of resolution.

As review sites become a larger factor in reputation management strategies as well as the decision-making process for consumers, business owners increasingly face the temptation of gaming the review process for ratings and recommendations. To be sure, there are right and wrong ways to generate reviews.