If you’re a small business and you get slammed online for surly wait staff, crappy pizza or poor service, there’s only so much you can do to fight back to your critics on Yelp.  According to a great article in Inc. Magazine, Craig Stoll, co-owner of Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco handles the negative feedback in a more creative way-he flaunts it-on t-shirts for his staff.  In Delfina’s opinion, fighting back on-line is a lose-lose situation, you either come off “defensive or accusatory” he says.

But others disagree with Stoll and say online feedback, no matter how brutal, can be a good opportunity for identifying areas of opportunity and improvement.  Boutique bookstore owner Eric Kirsammer of Quimby’s Bookstore in Chicago uses Yelp to regularly check for tips of what he could be doing better.  Quimby’s got rave reviews for the store’s selection but poor remarks for a perceived unwelcoming staff.  The solution? Kirsammer revamped his customer service approach and now makes a point of being extra welcoming, especially to new customers.

Two small business owners, two different philosophies.  In the corporate world, you can do much the same thing (sans the printed t-shirts).  You can choose a path of denial or ignorance (there’s a lot of noise out there anyway, it can be hard to discern what is meaningful and relevant versus what isn’t) or you can take your punches on the chin and face your critics head on.

I tend to think that all feedback, especially negative feedback, is a great and underutilized tool for improving performance.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s always nice to get props from friends and colleagues about how swell you and your ideas are, but is it helpful?  Not necessarily.

Jason Garrett, of the Dallas Cowboys tells his players, “I’m not going to tell you everything is ok and allow you to be mediocre.  I played [football] for a long time; the coaches that drive me crazy to this day are the ones that told me I was good all the time.  ‘Well hey, you’re doing a great job’ and I knew I was mediocre as hell.  And the guy that was on my ass, that made be good every day is the guy that I appreciate right now.”

I couldn’t agree more.  Carol Smith, SVP and chief brand officer for the Elle Group, agrees as well.  She recently sounded off in a NY Times article about the fact that she was a good confronter and believes that it’s better to say “That presentation was bad. It didn’t work, and here’s why it didn’t work” versus just calling it great and moving on to the next thing.

If you do decide that the feedback you get (solicited or unsolicited) is meaningful and relevant, than the key is to extract the constructive follow-up:  what can I do to improve?  What should I be doing differently? What should I do more of… or less of… or faster or slower or with a different goal, objective or target audience.  Are there other people (or businesses or strategies) I should model myself after? That’s where the learning is.  Push your critics to share their ideas or best practices or recommendations.  You can always decide once you’ve heard the remedy whether the advice is sound or not.

This spring, I was on a whirlwind tour of speaking presentations at business schools.  One morning, I arrived in Philly to speak to the Wharton MBAs.  I went to ladies room five minutes before the presentation, glanced at myself in a full length mirror and gasped.  There before my very eyes was me in a mis-matched suit.  A brown jacket paired with black pants and a blue shirt.  I was mortified.  How in the hell had I made it all the way from NYC to Philly without realizing I had put on the wrong pants (or jacket, depending on how you looked at it)?

A healthy dose of negative feedback would have done wonders for me that morning. Would it have killed the stranger on the subway to say to me, “Hey lady, you look ridiculous” or my husband, to say “Sweets, did you mean to put on black pants with a brown jacket?”  With a little feedback my fashion faux paux might easily have been avoided.