The old saying in Hollywood, "No publicity is bad publicity", never had a business on the Internet. A bad word about your firm can get indexed and travel at warp speed around the web. If you have an unhappy client who chose to post their less than stellar experience about your firm on a message board or blog rather than contact you directly about it, first of all don't panic.

Next, contact the individual and find out what their grievance was. Perhaps they did try to contact you and an overzealous spam filter halted their email or maybe they had an incorrect mailing address and assumed no response from you meant you just didn't care.

Then see what you can do. A good idea when dealing with an unhappy person is posting ill feelings about a specific product you sell or your company in general is to find out what they want. Do they want a refund? Do they want an apology? Ask them directly what will resolve the situation and if it is within your power- do it.

One situation involved a lady that purchased a pre-cut mat and frame set from an online retailer. The customer had measured correctly but given the frame company the incorrect measurements. She was only checking her piece of paper that she had written her measurements down on and decided the frame company was a crew of idiots that couldn't read and said so on a series of art community message boards. The frame company "Googled' itself often to see if the company name was being posted anywhere and ran across these posts. They contacted her to see that problem was and she told them of her ill fitting mat/frame set dilemma. They sent her a copy of her order that was incorrect and offered to re-cut her mat/frame set for free if she would go back and tell on those various message boards and blogs how the situation turned out. She agreed and happily got a mat/frame set to fit, the company got a problem resolved in the public eye and actually received orders as a result from people who stated they wanted to do business with a company that appeared to care about all their customers, even the ones that didn't fill out their orders correctly.

As you can see, the olive branch when extended in public is a powerful selling and publicity tool that can turn a bad situation into a good selling point for your firm.