As a business, no doubt you will have your run in with an upset customer or two. But what happens when that customer turns into a troll? Or what happens when you are subjected to the “experienced complainer”?

What’s an experienced complainer? Well those are the people who know how to “troll” the system. Knowing that if they complain enough, they’ll be placated with discounts, coupons, certificates, and special things all to “soothe” their complaints. They then figure out they can do this just about anywhere they go. All of a sudden, seemingly or magically they get free trips, special discounts, and the like, all because they threaten to write a letter of complaint. These days, even more damaging, they threaten to write a negative review on sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor or Epinions, or even possibly more damaging - write a blog post with a scathing review, with links to your website that are nofollowed.

As customers, I’m sure we’ve seen these types of people. Nothing ever makes them happy, not even free things (undoubtedly they’ll find something wrong with that, too). So what’s a company to do? How can they fight back? Can they takes steps to protect their good name and reputation from these types of complainers, scammers and trolls?

Seems helpless doesn’t it? Well take heart, people in these social communities are smart. Especially if you are making an honest effort to communicate with your audience and reaching out to them. They can smell a “troll” a mile away. They can peg a constant complainer usually within 2-5 posts on a forum or a blog, and they can certainly use their own voice to “out” them as the scammer they seem to be.

Is there anything else you can do? Well in this day and age of digital photos, videos and instant reviews by bloggers and review sites, you do need to do your do diligence before taking extreme actions against the constant complainers. Research and documentation into them is probably the best course of action, to proove that the complainer has a history of “never being happy”.

Take the case of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and a couple from Cleveland. I wrote about them on SearchMarketingGurus. This couple has done nothing but complain for years and were “soothed” with discounts, special packages and percentages off - all because they were Diamond Club members. I did a little poking around in forums, and the wife seems to leave a wide path of complaints all over the place. The communities even call her a whiner.

Royal Caribbean seems to have done a bit of homework here, and felt they’d never be able to make this couple happy. Guess what they did? They banned the couple from taking cruises on their cruise line for life. Drastic? Perhaps, but it does alleviate the issue dealing with a customer who seems more out to take advantage of your business than anything else.

While banning customers from your business might not be the first option you want to take, it is there if you have the need to do so, but prepare for backlash, undoubtedly the customer will play the victim in the end. In the case of Royal Caribbean, the local news interviewed the wife about the distressing news RC banned them, and a website or two came to her defense, saying complaining to much got them banned. But looking at other sites, the wife has been outted as a “constant whiner” - so who’s right? I guess that’s up to Royal Caribbean’s customers and online community to make their decision with their wallets.

If you are active with your audience, talking to them, interacting with them in social media, believe it or not a lot of times your customers will take up your defense. So the lesson to be learned here is hold an honest conversation with your customers or audience, as they say, the best defense, is a great offense.

What do Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama have in common? It is a woman. However, its not the woman that was taking the spotlight Saturday afternoon. No this time its not Hillary, so you need to guess again. Give up?

Mayhill Fowler

WHO?! Yep, that’s right Mayhill Fowler, someone you probably never heard of until today. Both of these polished and charismatic politicians were rocked by this unsuspecting amateur blogger, who is among 2,500 bloggers that write on Arianna Huffington’s The Huffington Post. The 61 year old, mother of two and Tennessee native, caught both of these high profile people in rather unflattering situations.

Fowler, back in April, caught Barack Obama’s “Bitter” comments on tape and set loose a firestorm for his campaign efforts in my state of Pennsylvania. This was literally non-stop for 2 weeks prior to my state’s primary.

Last week, Fowler was in South Dakota and caught Bill Clinton in what seems to be an unguarded moment when he let loose on his thoughts about Vanity Fair and their article about him.

Fowler, has no journalistic training. Fowler has no online marketing training. Fowler is a citizen journalist who describes herself as a person who “just discovered that I’m impelled to get out there and get the truth of the matter” to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz. Armed with her tape recorder (not even an iPod!), Fowler won’t even read her own posts, since the editors tend to change her lead-ins so more people will “click in” to read her pieces.

There’s a lesson here for businesses, public relations specialists and online marketers. It isn’t the A-listers like TechCrunch, Scoble or Rubel that are gettting the scoops these days and they should not be the sole focus of your online marketing efforts to get noticed or “picked up by”. Passionate bloggers who are in your industry writing about what they love best are who you should be paying attention, too.

As someone at one of my WOMMU breakout sessions said “A-Listers” at times can be like echo-chambers.

I couldn’t agree more. Be cognizant of the B,C and even D list bloggers. If those bloggers have any type of SEO training, their blog posts could start to rank right up there with the A-Listers. What’s more important to note, is that these “smaller” bloggers probably have a more passionate reader base, and a “scoop” on an “amateur” bloggers blog, can be just as damaging or beneficial, than the echo-chambers of the A-Listers.

Just ask Barack Obama and Bill Clinton about Mayhill Fowler, that should be enough to convince you.

*photo credit, Thor Swift of the Washington Post.

Whether you are doing a PPC campaign, an SEO initiative or even social media outreach you have have to have a plan. Without an online marketing strategy in place, how will you every know where to go, how to get there and what to do once your get there? If you don’t have a strategy, it’s kind of like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if its sticks (and is done). That’s not good for the cook - you waste spaghetti, time and have to clean the wall, and it’s certainly not good in online marketing - you waste resources, time and are left scratching your head in bewilderment.

When you are looking at starting an online marketing strategy, there’s some basic things you should take into account. Making sure all your bases are covered, will save you a lot of hassle and a lot of headaches in the long run. Sure, it may take a few more hours in planning, but it can gain you so much more in the end.

Research First
Research is probably the single most, foundational thing any marketer can do. Know your industry inside and out. Know your industry and how it relates in both an online and an offline marketing environment. Who’s your competition? Nine times out of ten, your competition is different offline than it is online.

How are people searching for you, the products or services you provide and is it different than the jargon you use? Do you want to focus on brand building or focus on the services / products? Can you do something totally different online than you do offline? By doing your research first, you can be prepared to make the right decisions and most likely get a leg up on the competition.

Decide What Online Marketing Facets To Utilize
Do I need to do PPC first? How about starting an online forum? What low hanging fruit can I pick from in the SEO world? Do I need to re-energerize my email marketing campaign? Maybe I need to do some videos & and images? Maybe, you need a piece of everything?

Knowing what approach you are going to utilize, SEO, PPC, Social Media, Email, Multimedia, Online PR or any other segments of online marketing is key to making a strategy work. Doing the research first will help you to determine what segments you really need to hone in on. If it’s a brand new site, you’ll likely need to boost that PPC campaign first, then bring in the SEO. If its an established site, maybe a little bit of social media is needed. Make sure your plan spells out what exactly you will need to use so that all the players on your team know where to put their time & resources.

Coordinate Offline & Online Marketing Initiatives
One of the biggest blunders large brands make is not coordinating their offline marketing with their online efforts. What happens when a commerical hits really big on TV? Most people head to YouTube looking for it, or they head to the company’s site. If offline and online don’t mesh, someone else can take advantage of that company’s “miss”.

It’s not enough to just put up a video or a photo, or even a blog post these days. Coordinating offline, with all facets of online marketing is needed. More often these days, people do not use just one source to find what they are looking for. They may start at a search engine, but then the go off to social sites looking for information, too. Planning and strategizing for this is essential to your marketing success.

Decide What To Measure
One of the most important things to do from the very beginning of any online marketing effort is to decide what is going to be measured. Is it incoming traffic, is it time on site, is it number of pages in a visit or maybe its conversions? Not only is this important, but it’s important to segment that measurement.

By segmenting the measurements, you are going to know where and how these items are succeeding or failing. You can know whether its a landing page or the home page that’s driving the bounce rate up. Is that particular keyword really focused on what it needs to be? Is there a problem with your shopping cart? All of these can be seen if you decide what to measure and what segments to look at before you implement that online marketing initiative.

What Are Your Success Factors?
So you’ve got an idea of what you want to do online marketing wise, right? Well how are you going to determine whether or not that initiative is successful? Traffic & hits alone can’t give you a whole picture. Just because your traffic went up, doesn’t mean that your plan was a success.

Did you get new subscribers? Did anyone buy the product or service you were promoting? Did you get new links pointing into the marketing piece you launched? Did that email get opened more and did the receivers click through? Without setting goals and deciding on what is deemed a success, you are never going to know whether or not that marketing strategy was truly a success or a colossal blunder that shouldn’t be repeated again.

What Happens Next?
It’s not enough to just plan for “right now”, you need to also plan for “what’s next”. Is your marketing strategy agile enough to be able to capitalize on a successful viral marketing piece? Is your online marketing plan taking into account that PPC effort is tanking and costing too much? What are the contingencies you’ve set in place?

If you don’t plan for what’s next, you could miss out on some great opportunities that come your way from both successes and failures. Also planning for what comes next gives your team something to strive for an attain - the next milestone in the online marketing plan. Knowing what you’d like to do next, also helps you to keep an eye out both budget and resource wise before you actually implement. If your team also knows what is coming next, you have multiple eyes looking out to make the next action in your online marketing strategy a success.