The words you say today may be the words you have to eat tomorrow. An old saying my father gave me, and one that is much more true today than ever. Especially when it comes to email and the internet age in general. Things you write are going to come back and haunt you.

So it’s no surprise that an email has come out that is really damaging the reputation of one movie theater in St. Croix Falls, Wi is having some serious issues with customer service lashbacks.

Here’s the skinny:

Sarah Kohl-Leaf of Taylors Falls, Minn., complained in her letter that the theater offered no option to purchase tickets with a credit or debit card, meaning she and her husband had to use their cash for the tickets and then borrow money from the other couple to purchase refreshments. (The lobby ATM was reportedly out of cash.) Then, she said, the staff interrupted the movie to check the ticket stubs of the seated audience.

“I did not pay 18.00 to have a distracted experience,” she wrote in a letter to the company and later posted to Facebook. “I would rather drive to White Bear Lake, where they obviously know how to run a theater than have this experience again.”

She said she was shocked by the response she said she received from Payne:

Drive to White Bear Lake and also go f*** yourself. If you dont have money for entertainment, get a better job, and don’t pay for everything on your credit or check card. You can also shove your time and gas up your f****** ass. Also, find better things to do with your time. This email is an absolute joke. We don’t care to have you as a customer. Let me know if you need directions to white bear lake.

Kohl-Leaf said she soon received a follow-up e-mail from Payne (also posted to Facebook), which offered an apology for the previous e-mail and suggested that a recent management change was to blame for her poor movie-going experience:

Mrs. Kohl-Leaf, I tried to contact you via a phone call to issue this apology personally and was unable to reach you. I sincerely apologize for my inappropriate response to your email yesterday. As vice president, I should never have reacted that way, no matter how I felt about your email. At Evergreen Entertainment, customer service is an important part of our business, and that clearly was not reflected by my use of profane language.

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Umm, too little, too late. Understand, it doesn’t have to be a vice president in your company to hurt your online reputation. Nope, it can be employees much further down the line. In this case, some of the staff at the theater caused a sufficient distraction to incite this woman to write an email to the corporate office. Then the VP made it worse by responding poorly.

The end result? A Facebook group that is now almost 5,000 strong. A little over twice the population of the town that this cinema serves.

The power of the internet is strong my friends. If you are not watching your behavior or your reactions in areas of customer service, you can almost bet on the fact that it’s going to be taken online at some point. Which in turn is always, I REPEAT, ALWAYS going to hurt your company reputation.

Understand, it doesn’t have to be a valid complaint, nor does it have to be something that you’ve done wrong to hurt your online reputation. If it gets legs, like it has in this case, it’s going to hurt your bottom line. You are the company, in the court of public opinion, you are always going to be the bad guy in a case like this. No one is ever going to hear much about how this ends up being resolved. All anyone will remember is the negative connotation this company had at one time.

But it gets worse for them, because it’s not only memories anymore. Nope, we live in the age of the electronic reputation. The age of the search engine result pages. The age of Google and googling. With this bad press, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of websites are going to report on this story. Which in turn, those story pages are going to be in the search engine result pages.

FOREVER….

People that do a search for this company for years to come are going to find info about this incident. Which is why it’s so important for a company to manage their online reputation proactively as an ongoing effort and not just as a reactive response to negative press such as this. Because that is exactly what this company is probably going to end up having to do in order to clean up the mess. Work on moving that info to the depths of the seach pages. Sure the buzz will quietly die away quickly, but those pesky search pages will be there forever if they don’t launch a reputation cleanup campaign right away.

Which, trust me, they will.

Bottom line… Don’t wait for something tragic like this to happen in your company. Train your staff and let them know that they represent you and your company at all times. At the same time, start a proactive web reputation management campaign. The work you do today might just save your business tomorrow.

If you need help in starting a web reputation plan, or you need to clean up some existing bad press, give our office a call at 800-818-6286.