#276 I GOT A 1-STAR REVIEW

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A small group of dentists may be doing more damage to the profession than anyone realizes.

In this episode, Gary breaks down how just 20–30 highly negative people can dominate online communities with criticism, ridicule, one-star reviews, and retaliation tactics that keep thousands of dentists silent. You'll learn why so many dentists avoid asking questions, sharing wins, discussing practice management, dental marketing, fee-for-service growth, and new patient strategies in public forums.

Drawing from years of experience leading SMC and working with over 1,195 dental practices, Gary explains the difference between the silent majority and the vocal minority, and why healthier professional communities require more good people to participate.

If you're a dentist, practice owner, startup, or DSO leader, this conversation will challenge the way you think about leadership, culture, communication, and the future of dentistry.

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Dental Marketing Goat is the go-to podcast for dentists who want to grow faster, market smarter, and build practices that thrive in today’s competitive landscape. 
Hosted by Gary Bird, the Dental Marketing Goat himself and founder of SMC National, recently named Best Dental Marketing Agency by over 60,000 dental professionals. Each episode unpacks the real strategies, marketing frameworks, and operational shifts that high-performing practices use to attract more patients and increase production. Whether you're a solo practitioner or scaling a DSO, you’ll learn how to align your marketing, team, and systems to drive predictable growth.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning, good morning, good morning. Today I woke up and I had the pleasure of reading a one-star review that I got from a dentist that we've never worked fr with before. So if you haven't been following along with this saga, yesterday I posted about uh Facebook being negative. Facebook is largely a negative place. I get it. There's a lot of negativity on social media, but dentistry as a whole is especially negative. Now it's not the whole group, there's a ton of amazing people in dental. I love working in dental. I have a ton of dental friends, dentists that are friends, vendors that are friends. It's an amazing place. However, the 5% of people who are absolutely unhinged and negative about everything, everywhere, all the time, make it unbearable. And a lot of times what ends up happening is these dentists will do things that are so unethical that if someone else did them, they would lose their brain. And so one of these dentists from one of these groups, after they saw my post about them being super negative, decided it would be a good idea to go leave us a one-star Google review. Now, I don't get triggered about Google reviews, but I know the dental industry definitely gets triggered about triggered by Google reviews. So imagine if I went online and I started posting negative reviews to dental practices of just dentists I didn't like. People would lose their brain. And it it started to make me think, you know what, in a lot of these groups, there's the silent majority, meaning a group might have 30,000 people in it. There's 20 dentists that are like super noisy on every post, negative, negative, negative. They make fun of everyone, they just just they're always negative, trashing everything, everybody, every everything that they can. But then there's 10,000, 20,000 dentists in there that are just silent and just watching it. And the reason they don't participate with it is because they're fear, they're fearful of retaliation of getting negative Google reviews or being reported to the board or are just being ridiculed into the ground and dogpiled on by this 20 or 30 dentist. And unfortunately for these haters, I'm not going to be quiet about it. I know other people might be scared into submission, but I'm not. I look at it as an opportunity to talk about them and to continue to educate people that, hey, if we're if we want these communities to be a better place, you need to speak up, you need to say something, and you gotta call out the ridiculous behavior. That doesn't mean you have to agree with me. That doesn't even mean you have to like me. I get it. Not everybody likes the marketing guy. I totally understand that. But it's not just the marketing guy that gets attacked, it's every single person. It's the younger dentist that needs clinical support and they ask a question and everybody dogpiles on them. It's the person who who's new to dental and they ask a question about it and everybody ridicules them, so they decide not to go into the dental industry. It's it's all of these people, and again, it's it's not a lot of people who are negative, it's a small group of people who are negative over and over and over again. And it's just gonna continue to be a problem until the major the silent majority says something about it and aren't scared of the 20 people who are just trashing people. So for me, if you've never worked with me before and you're leaving me negative Google reviews, that isn't going to stop me from talking about these kind of things. This is only gonna make me double down, triple down, and continue to point out how ridiculous your behavior is and just acting like children. And the funny thing is, is they would never act this way at a dental event. I've never had anybody come up and approach me and talk to me the way that they talk to me online at a dental event. They would never do that. So it says a lot about those people, and I just hope that we could have nice things. I wish we could have more dentists participating in these dental groups, but again, a lot of people are scared. This is why everybody has to post anonymously because people are so negative. There's a small group of people that are so negative. So comment down below. What's the solution to this? How do we fix this? How do we make it a better place? I know some of some people are working on this and and trying really hard to make things a better place. I know some people don't care. Some people like the drama. So comment down below. Let me know what your thoughts are. I would love to hear from you.