Back in the day (which was October 2009), John wrote a post about Utilizing Customer Reviews to book hotel rooms. In the post, he wrote, “Don’t fear negative reviews, embrace them.” This still holds true, nearly a year after the fact (which is about 31 internet years). Today, Google rolled out the ability to respond to reviews directly from Place pages:

This is good news for proactive social media and online reputation management types. For those of you who believe that responding to negative reviews will always end badly, Google posted some guidelines (abridged below):

Be Nice

Don’t Get Personal

Feedback is Helpful (both positive and negative)

The only thing I’d add when responding to negative reviews is to always offer the negative reviewer the opportunity to discuss the problem offline, or online but in a more private setting (such as Email, Skype, or Twitter DMs). Enjoy the new feature, and get posting!