Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Bruce Billson interview with Brian Carlton.

Radio 2CC

Subject: Fake online reviews, digital platforms.

Brian Carlton
This is one of those issues that is particularly devastating for small businesses who find themselves with a bunch of really, really poor online reviews. Now, you go to a restaurant or something and you can review us here, how many stars, et cetera, et cetera. The capacity for really, really bad reviews in an organised kind of way from some kind of commercial opposition, your competition, is real. They're massively, devastating. And exactly how to deal with one or several or a heap or hundreds or thousands, depending on the nature of your business, is a tricky one. There's a really, really good column today by Bruce Billson. Now, Bruce is the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, and he's talking to this issue directly. If you are a business of some kind and you're getting really negative reviews online and you think they're dodgy, fake or designed to damage your business in some way, what on earth can you actually do about it? Bruce Billson joins me. Bruce, good afternoon. How are you?

Bruce Billson
Great to be with you and your listeners and I hope you go well with the hot cross buns.

Brian Carlton
Have you got any tips? Do you know any places in Canberra that have great hot cross buns?

Bruce Billson
Look, some of my friends would say I've got many flaws. One of them is I'm a celiac, so I'm a gluten free guy.

Brian Carlton
So you don't do hot cross buns?

Bruce Billson
Well, there are a couple of hot cross buns around and the crowd that make the donuts at Manuka Oval that do gluten free donuts. I mean, if they could diversify into hot cross buns gluten free, I think that would be a revolution and there'd be celiacs rejoicing around the world.

Brian Carlton
And you could count on an order for at least a dozen.

Bruce Billson
That's an example of a business that's innovating in Canberra. And I guess the column in the Canberra Times today is talking about another area where so many of our small and family businesses are innovating. That's their online digital presence. For some, Brian, it's their main channel to their market. How they delight customers and the risk that that can be compromised or abused by some of the very platforms that they're using, is really what we're talking about in that column today.

Brian Carlton
Let's start back at the beginning of the process. Say you run a restaurant or some other kind of business and there's maybe a new disruptive competitor just moved into the market in your area and they set about getting their friends and acquaintances and colleagues and relatives and God knows who else to jump online and smash, in terms of reviews, the business that they want to take on and get market share from. It's being used as a business strategy these days, isn't it, in many cases.

Bruce Billson
Well, it's worse than that, Brian. There's actually some businesses that offer the service of trash talking a competitor for a fee with fake reviews from people that don't exist, to drive down ratings and the like, to sort of lay the groundwork for a new competitor to come into a market. Now, that kind of stuff is just downright shabby and not cool. But for a legitimate business, currently the options for you to deal with that aren't that great. There is a code that operates that the ACCC encourages review platforms to attend to, but that's been around for some years and clearly hasn't worked.

Brian Carlton
Okay, so let's just stop there for a second. Say I run a small business. I'm being impacted by a negative online campaign targeting my business. I go to the platform that is hosting those complaints and say, come on, this is obviously a concerted campaign to, as you say, trash talk my business. Can you please stop it? And they do what?

Bruce Billson
Well, at the moment the answer too often is not much, if anything. And that's why we're encouraging government and policymakers to turn their mind to that recommendation from the ACCC to put in a mandatory ‘notice and action’ mechanism. So, where it's clearly a review that lacks any credibility, any bona fides, a business can make that known to the platform and then they'd have a duty to do something about it. At the moment that doesn't exist. The sort of guidance that's given is, well, let us have a look at it. Your best thing you can do is contest the review. Go back and respond to it.

Brian Carlton
How do you prove that, though, Bruce? Let's use a restaurant, because it's fairly subjective. I go to a restaurant and the service is rubbish and the food's cold. And I go ‘service rubbish, food cold'. That's not part of a campaign, as such, it's a genuine review. How do you separate the two? How do you know?

Bruce Billson
Well, how you separate it is the way the platforms currently can. You might remember we had some fairly animated characters hovering around the Capital demanding their freedom and rights and at the same time infringing on everybody else's. And there were some strong views held about that. There was a local business asked to move some of the vehicles that were blocking access around our capital. And then the protest movement then turned on that business and started slamming that business with all sorts of reviews. Now, I got in touch with some of the platforms that are well known and said, this is not right. This is a small business doing what law enforcement is lawfully asking them to do. What can we do about it? Now, what they could do about it, is identify where those reviews were coming from. Is there a surge of reviews that looks nothing like the normal activity that user would be generating? So, there are mechanisms within the algorithms of these platforms to pick out these rogue, campaign-orientated, fake type of reviews and to take them out of the general, more legitimate reviews. Not all of them are complementary, but those that are legitimate and seem to have some basis in fact.

Brian Carlton
Okay, this is not an easy issue by any stretch of the imagination. Let's just say you've managed to identify – here's me, business owner, again. I've been subject to these targeted and nonsense attacks. I make a report to the platform on which they're hosted and manage to get through to somebody who says they'll help. ‘We'll conduct an investigation into that’. The investigation can take how long, and in the meantime, all those bad reviews are still up.

Bruce Billson
And that's part of why we put this opinion piece into The Canberra Times. Some of the ideas that are being canvassed, involve processes that are going to take weeks and weeks and weeks. Now, by the time that is dealt with, actioned, resolved, the economic harm is possibly already entrenched, and the business may struggle to get back. In some cases where it's a business-to-business dispute or a business has a dispute with one of those platforms and they can't resolve it with direct engagement with the platforms, they come to my agency, Brian, and then we've got a process of talking to a real person, getting really swift action, so that that is contained, it's cauterised and action is addressed. And that usually comes after the businesses has tried to navigate their way through the guidance tools that these online platforms provide. But what if your complaint is because someone's hacked your account, maybe put up some inappropriate image which rightly, has seen the account taken down, but it wasn't you. You can't talk to anybody to explain that, yet that key channel to your customers is not available to you for weeks and weeks and weeks.

This is why we're arguing for a policy change, for a dispute resolution agency support like what we provide, and really equipping small and family businesses with the tools to protect themselves and really appreciate that with the opportunities that digital tools offer, there are also some risks that they need to take protections against.

Brian Carlton
Yeah, indeed. Part of your column deals with hacks on small business servers or wherever they're keeping their data cloud. I'm surprised there's not more ripples of fear going through the small business sector off the back of Latitude, Optus and Medibank not being able to fend off their particular hackers. I mean, if the companies of that size with the resources that they have can be victims, and I use the term advisedly, of hacks, what hope does a small business have? It probably hasn't given a nanosecond’s thought to data security.

Bruce Billson
Well, they have a lot of hope as long as they see this as an important part of their business. Like the bakers that you were talking about earlier. They wouldn't go home at night leaving the front door unlocked and open and the keys to the till, so they take certain protections. And this is the same here. There are ways of putting in multifactor authentication, having genuine passwords, updating the software you've got with its most current version. Making sure not every person who might happen to have something to do with your business has access to passcodes and really managing that digital presence as a key asset like they would for any other key asset in the business.

And that's why the announcement today about the government's Digital Solutions Small Business Advisory Service support for some of these digital tools and how best to make use of them, is really welcome and something we'd encourage more of into the future.

Brian Carlton
I was having a chat with a small business owner only days ago about all this, apropos the Latitude one, and the question was put to me - and I didn't know the correct answer, so I said I don't know as I generally do when I don't know - the question was, am I better off looking after all of my customer accounts and all the various sensitive information from my client base in a server at the back of the shop? Or am I better off putting it on the cloud? Because he’d been getting calls from all sorts of people offering cloud support for data. Have you got an opinion on that?

Bruce Billson
I do. It's a case-by-case thing, which is not really a great answer for your business-owner friend. But the key thing is, if you're managing your own server, then you need all those management techniques and technologies and expertise to protect it. If you are using commercial services, often they provide those safeguards as part of their service. If your accounting information is in the cloud, you'd expect your accounting software provider to have certain features in there. Your telecommunications provider is working to provide what's called clean pipes, which cuts off a lot of the malicious traffic that might compromise your business. Your banking transactions might make sure you're not subject to what's called the invoice substitution scam, where you get a very legitimate looking invoice, but a hack has gone in and switched around the account details. So, you think you're doing the right thing paying the bill, but it's actually going off to some other account.

Brian Carlton
Extraordinary.

Bruce Billson
So, these are the things that we need to keep an eye on. But being digitally engaged, it's a key factor in business resilience, in growth prospects. So, we've got to find a way of navigating this world, and that's really what my column was aiming to do.

Brian Carlton
It's such a steep learning curve for people who've been in the same industry for many years and have seen fundamentally changed under the digital revolution, and many of them feel at a bit of a loss as to how to deal with all this. Bruce, it's an excellent column, and I'd recommend anybody who owns a small business and is coping those unfair trash talk attacks from competitors or somebody else, and you've not been able to get a resolution, contact the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman's office, of which Bruce Billson is the Ombudsman. Appreciate it, Bruce. Thank you kindly, as ever.

Bruce Billson
Fab to be with you, Brian. And good luck in your search for the perfect hot cross buns.

ENDS