VIC Defamation of Business on Facebook?

[Sp1982]

I run a small cleaning business and rely heavily on advertising on Facebook buy swap sell pages. Recently we had an issue with one such page. One of our employees took a photo of an item in a customers house and posted the photo in a reply to a comment on a post on her private facebook page. She did not reveal the customers name or location. This photo was then taken by someone and posted on a public page naming and shaming our business. The employee was reprimanded, and made a public apology and the customer was compensated financially. We have had one person put a negative review on our facebook business page even though they have never used our business and the issue had nothing to do with then at all.

Can we ask them to remove their review or face legal defamation action?

And secondly we had a customer who used our services after enquiring about them by commenting on our business page, and was very happy. She then informed us that the admin of the local 'cleaners page' had inboxed her and warned her against using us due to the whole photo scandal. She has also never used our services, and is obviously watching our business page to see who is enquiring about our services. So again can we ask her to stop or face legal action?

I understand if it was a public forum and the customer was asking for advice about our business but she enquired on our business page! To me thats like standing outside a shop front and warning people not to go in there. I can't imagine how many customers we may have missed out on because of this woman and as it is we can no longer use the buy swap sell pages to advertise our business either. Some information as to where I stand on this would be very helpful.

 

[Ponala]

Depends what she is saying. If making comments that are unture about your business, then you might have the ability to do same. If her comments are around the 'photo scandal' and along the lines related to that, and not the business itself, probably not. eg: 'don't use this company there work is shoddy they break things and rip you off and they don't respond to complaints and the owner is'...maybe defamation or 'a customer once used them and a worker took a photo of the customers whatever and posted it up be careful when using them'..then probably not as it is based on truth.

 

[Sp1982]

The inbox received by our customer goes as follows

Hi (customers name)
I was looking at the (business name) FB site and noticed that you asked them about doing a vacate clean. I'm the creator and admin of (name of cleaning page) and had to pin a post on there to warn the public about the (business name)
Perhaps a vacate clean isn't as private as doing a regular clean in a home lived in by the residents but I feel the need to warn you. Unfortunately these people have proven that their word is not to be trusted nor are their ethics.

Hope this helps clarify the question a bit more. Thank you for your response ponala