It seems to me that writers take criticism better than many others. Perhaps we just have thicker skins? Or maybe we have been [...]]]> If you are a business owner, then the last thing you want to see is a negative review of your business. It feels terrible. Trust me, I know, I am a writer.

It seems to me that writers take criticism better than many others. Perhaps we just have thicker skins? Or maybe we have been trained that being criticized is part of being a writer? Twenty years ago, when I first started to write, I submitted a short story to a critique group I was a member of at that time. The story was nothing fancy, just your basic spaceship crew investigates why a mining colony has stopped communicating, finds nearly everyone was killed after they unearthed a dormant nest of nasties deep down in the mine. I got the idea from a news piece at the time about Io and the possibility of finding useful material in the ice, coupled with another report that there could possibly be life down under the ice sheets of Io. One of the reviews I got back from the group was scathing, not for my writing, but for me! I was accused of ripping off Heinlein, whom I have never read. I’m more of a fantasy genre person, and just had a muse tickled by news reports so whipped out a shirt SciFi story. The lesson I learned: there are no original plots.

I kept right on writing. I now make my living as a writer; granted, it’s advertisement copywriting that pays the bills, but I still work from time to time on my novels and short stories as well. I do not hold any ill will toward the fellow that accused me of ripping off Heinlein, it was his perspective on the situation and I took that perspective and let it make me into a better writer. Which is why I do not understand why other professions do not take a cue from writers and take the bad with the good.

Everyone has an opinion, and the best we can do is to make sure we give reasons for more good opinions than bad opinions. This is of particular importance in the age of the Internet, where a review of a company (good or bad) is able to be linked to, commented on, and lives forever in the silica landscape of Cyber Space.

A 2009 article on a lawsuit that was filed over a negative review on the website Yelp includes a statement by a Yelp spokeswoman who said: “Most businesses engage constructively with customers who haven’t had a good experience. When that doesn’t work, they recognize that they can’t always make one hundred percent of their customers happy one hundred percent of the time, and don’t risk the huge expense and potential negative publicity that comes with suing one of their customers.”

And that is what people seem to forget. In so many cases, there is far more harm done by a lawsuit than a negative review could ever have done. If, rather than filing a lawsuit, the person had practiced good business and improved their business based on the negative criticism, their reputation would have been so much better off.

Take for instance the above mentioned lawsuit. The customer of a business gave the business a negative review on Yelp. The business owner took offense and asked the person to remove the review, stating that it was all a misunderstanding of his office procedures and that the review unjustly characterized him as being unethical and dishonest. The business was, in fact, a sponsored advertiser on Yelp at the time, and encouraged his customers to write reviews on the website. The person who wrote the negative review removed it two days after they were sent a letter by the business owner’s attorney threatening a lawsuit if the review was not removed. One month later – the lawsuit was filed.

The review, according to an article on the case, caused no decline in the number of referrals that the business received from Yelp, however, after the business owner opened the lawsuit there were fewer referrals – this according to the defendant’s attorney, who cited Yelp documents as the source of the information.

So, by filing a lawsuit against someone that had given them a negative review, the business did far more harm than the review ever could have. And that is not a unique situation. Consider the case of Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who recently filed a lawsuit against the Washington City Paper. An article in the newspaper, accompanied by a picture of Snyder on which devil features had been doodled in pen, listed reasons that the writer felt Snyder was a bad owner. Snyder felt that he was “forced” to file a lawsuit to protect his good name and reputation. Unfortunately for him, the lawsuit did far more to harm his reputation and name than the article ever could have.

The lawsuit lead to public scrutiny – via Twitter – of Snyder’s prior activities and gained the attention of the media. Because of the lawsuit many people that might not have seen the article sought it out to read it. Worse, for Snyder, people began to look into his past on their own and started discussing it online in blogs and on social networking sites.

Snyder’s reputation would have been much better off had he ignored the article, and instead focused on what he could do to counter the comments that had been made about him.

And those are not the only situations where a lawsuit has caused the person who felt they were defamed or slandered to end up doing themselves more harm by opening a lawsuit than the item they found offensive and are suing for. Since I can name several cases, I am sure there must be many more situations where a lawsuit has done far more harm than the original bad publicity. There might be instances where legal action is the right move, however, I think that if one looks at what has come from such lawsuits, it would be discovered that in many instances the damage done to a person or company by filing a lawsuit, is far worse than the perceived defamation or slander ever was.

My advice to anyone thinking that they might sue someone for a bad review or a bad article about them or their business, would be to first consider what kind of response the lawsuit might spark in the media and social networking sites. Then consider if it might be better to simply correct the issues the review or article brought up and build a solid reputation going forward that would not leave one open to negative reviews or articles. Especially if, such as is the case with Snyder, there are things in one’s past that would be raised by the discussions a lawsuit sparks.