Archive for January, 2009

Core fitness studios in Falmouth Cornwall: deserves a MRB we think

Jan 11 | by Sam Deeks | mukau reputation boost
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A Mukau Reputation Boost* for Core Fitness and Body Studios in Cornwall for great handling of online reputation problem.

*Mukau Reputation Boost: A independent, positive and confidence-inspiring comment about your company placed high in the Google search results for your company’s keywords. (Try it: do a Google search for ‘fitness studios falmouth‘)

We’re always on the lookout to see how businesses deal with unhappy customers online to award them a free Mukau Reputation Boost

So we’re happy to announce an MRB for Helen Tite (manager of Core Fitness and Body Studio) for the positive way she responded to an unhappy customer in the Network Cornwall forum who was expressing her annoyance at not receiving a free session that Core had offered.

Helen’s response was respectful, non-reactive and generous – offering 3 free classes so the lady could get ‘to see how lovely me and my awesome team of instructors are’.

The result? The following post from the customer:

“Well, what a response. I am overwhelmed and so should the guys at Core be. People have had great things to say about the team there and I have renewed faith. Helen from the Core has been in touch and been very helpful and we have sorted out the misunderstanding”

How much is that comment worth?

How much is that comment worth at the top of Google when people are searching for your services?

Well done Helen for great customer service!


World Business Directory: scam or not? You decide (we’ll help you)

Jan 11 | by Sam Deeks | GRRRR!!!, Scambusters!, The Mu Show, scam warning
92 Comments

Is the World Business Directory a scam? Depends on whether you feel £980 a year to advertise in its ‘directory’ is good value for your money or not.

Like me, you might receive this from World Business Directory.

The email comes with an attached pdf that you’re invited to fill in. For a free listing (yawn, please see my endless posts on the total lack of benefits of free listing in most legit directories!) the form invites you to fill in your company details.

Boxes at the bottom of the form invite your signature & co. stamp – reinforced by the words “please fill in the form completely” in bold.

One small sentence tells you only to sign the form if you want to place an ‘insertion’ – a deliberately uncommon word.

A dense pile of even smaller print tells you that signing the form constitutes a contract to place an ‘insertion’ at £980 per year – minimum period 3 years.

It’s up to you to decide whether you think this is a cynical fraud or not.

This might help you decide. I know where I stand and so do people of many other countries where this occurs (word for word). Click the thumbnail (left) for a detailed look at their form -and a spanish one for comparison.

This also might help you: a letter from MEP Sarah Ludford to one World Business Directory victim.  You might also like to see the letter that same victim then sent to the so-called ‘collections agency’ operating on behalf of WBD.  Nice one, Mary.

One thing’s for sure, if you rush ahead and sign and return this form thinking you’re going to get a Google-boost from this free directory listing, be prepared: you’ll end up with on of these (right)

What gets me is that Barclays Bank are happy to take the money. Nasty.

Here’s another variant of this scam offer.

[Update] Now operating out of Utrecht, Netherlands [Update]

Picture 5

‘Zimbabwean poem’ chain mail

Jan 10 | by Sam Deeks | scam warning
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This ‘loving Zimbabwean father’s poem’ shows why the Internet is so ripe for scammers

I got this from a well-meaning friend today. A 15 second scam-scan on Google turned up this - proving this to be just another of the endless chain emails going round the globe. Note: there is no 3 cents to AOL. Nobody is being helped. Nothing is happening except the internet clogging up with more junk.

And it’s been going since 2000.

Ok, so it’s fairly harmless in that it doesn’t do anything bad to any individual. What it is, though, is a litmus test for vulnerability.

Everyone who passes this onwards, swayed by the pathos of the story and rendered uncritical by the appeal for help exposes themselves as ripe for exploitation.

I copy-pasted the link and hit ‘reply-all’ to everyone in this sorry chain.

What’s stupid is that I feel like the bad guy – for spoiling everyone’s dream!

If you remain uncritical in the online world, expect to be exploited.

Spotify playlists – an information goldmine

Jan 10 | by Sam Deeks | ORM, marketing
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What will Spotify’s personal playlist information about me be worth? And who will buy it?

Well, first of all, me probably – in a desperate attempt to salvage my online reputation.

Can I just state here that I deliberately picked Donny Osmond for this picture? However, the truth is that last night I DID listen to The Jam, some punk, a bit of The Police, a Howard Jones track and the instrumental music from ‘Titanic’.

See what I mean? You’re already starting to form a picture of me as a middle-aged sentimentalist, going for the occasional shuffle down memory lane while blogging away on my iMac.  And you’d be right. Doh.

So in a ‘post-music-ownership’ era, what will this information be used for? And what could I learn about you from your playlists?

World Business Directory: don’t sign the form

Jan 10 | by Sam Deeks | Scambusters!, scam warning
5 Comments

Don’t sign the World Business Directory form unless you want to lose £2940

This nasty piece of work arrived in my inbox today.

It appears to offer you the chance to ‘update’ your data for free on a business directory.

However, the small print says quite clearly:

THE SIGNING OF THIS DOCUMENT REPRESENTS THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE FOLLOWING……THE VALIDATION TIME OF THE CONTRACT IS THREE YEARS….I HEREBY ORDER A SUBSCRIPTION….THE PRICE PER YEAR IS GBP 980.

You might want to ask yourself – what possible benefit could this company give you that’s worth £2940?  A quick Google on the company name ‘EU Business Services Ltd’ leads to this informative site.

Still, these people would say, you were warned. And they would be right. After all, it does say ‘only sign if you want to place an insertion’. Mind you, it also says “please fill in the form completely” in bold in an attempt to get you to sign.

Those who know me know how much I dislike online directories at the best of times. With a bit of luck this post will zip to the top of Google for anyone wondering about this so-called directory – and maybe stop one or two people falling for this cynical piece of work.

Google Earth on a 30″ Mac monitor. Wow

Jan 8 | by Sam Deeks | WOW!
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Google Earth on a 30″ Mac monitor.  I won’t even bother trying to show you what it looks like.

Its awesome.  Its about the best thing you can do with the Internet in my book.

The only bad thing about it is that it uses up time and money you should be spending on going there :-)

That said, if you’re in the office and you want to connect with that special place, it’s awesome.

KGB.com – no irony

Jan 7 | by Sam Deeks | what do you think?
3 Comments

KGB.com: ironically, a project that wants to control information

I picked this up from Google trends this morning.  ‘KGB.com‘.  I’m not sure what it’s trying to be (it really isn’t obvious).  It appears to critique the traditional search process (effectively the ‘disorganisedness’ of Google search findings).

It seems to want to offer people a way to contextualise what they find.  By putting in their space.  Right.

A space that you immediately notice is AdSense populated.

Is it a search engine?

No it is not. At kgb.com, our goal is allow you to find what information you need right on our site, rather than just direct you to other locations on the web as a normal search engine would.

Of course, they use search engines to bring this information to your space in their world.  If KGB.com is trying to give people tools to manage chaotic online information, then what are they?  My initial review didn’t detect what those tools might be.  From my initial review, KGB ends up looking like yet another walled information community (like AOL was, Facebook IS…) that can be – rather uninspiringly – capitalised with Google ads.

What’s your view?

It says you can ask it any question and get an answer.  Ok.  Here are a couple: what was the KGB in the Soviet Union and how did it control information?

UKTV Style – ‘A Listers Unzipped’ – vaccuous, poisonous TV

Jan 7 | by Sam Deeks | GRRRR!!!
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Whoa. I accidentally put on UKTV Style this morning and got ‘A Listers Unzipped’

With Myleen Klaas. 5 people getting off criticising how other people look. Spending time using computers to ‘re-dress’ stupid Hollywood stars who have committed fashion crimes. Oh, don’t worry. It’s balanced. They have a part of the show called ‘They got it right’ – dedicated to stars who have got it wrong in the past. That’s alright, then.

This, Wall-E fans, is why we don’t talk to each other and why we’re destroying our planet.

What?

Yes. This inner unhappiness that craves putting other people down in order to feel good. It’s so ingrained in our culture (you know, the one where every TV show or film is based on conflict?) that most of us don’t even notice it.

What I did notice was the 5 people on this show’s body language. They’re all sitting with legs crossed and arms crossed with their hands forward over their knees to protect themselves.

Why wouldn’t they?  That’s what struck me as Myleen looked into the camera and said

“Now, when I go out to an event that’s being watched by 80 million people, I like to make sure I look good…”

How awful, how vulnerable she must feel every second she’s judging other women on the way they look.

Wall-E movie review. Proof I’m mad.

Jan 6 | by Sam Deeks | review
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Wall-E scored 96% in the Rotten Tomatoes site – with 208 good to 8 bad reviews.

Imagine what its like to feel almost totally alone in a world where everyone else has gone off in a different direction. I know how Wall-E must have felt, bless him.

These days, it has become fashionable to love everything new, shiny and CGI – particularly if it purports to have some important, timely message for us. Anybody who doesn’t love it (the mass hysteria goes) hasn’t got a heart.

Ah well. That’s me branded then.

I watched Wall-E with a desperate hope that – given no dialogue for 30 minutes, and given our ‘prowess’ in computer animation – I’d at least be treated to a visual spectacle worth sitting still for.

What I got – from the clumsily out of place opening music to the grating anthropocentricity of Wall-E and his attachment to cute objects – was another piece of Hollywood trapped in the cycle of media obsession and self-referencing that turned me off King Kong in as short a time.

I know everyone else in the human race loves Wall-E. I don’t. Given that CGI not only gives you the chance to create breathtaking worlds of the imagination but breathtaking ways of people and things interacting, did we get either? No. We got a world that was more of the same in every sense. And we got emotional gestures and interactions that were depressingly – maddeningly – familiar and tired.

Hollywood is trapped in its own limited range of ideas and gestures. Draw a gun, Eve! They do it in every movie! Blow things up, Eve! You just gotta.

CGI seems to have fooled everyone into thinking that you just change the skin of a movie and Presto! A new story.

I summed up my review for Wall-E in a text to a friend:

“Don’t worry, kids, we’re all going to get incredibly fat but then good technology is going to come along and save us from bad”

End. Ah, well. I suppose I’ll just roll back into my container with my bits and bobs, then.

I can make you thin…k about starting your own blog

Jan 6 | by Sam Deeks | Benefits of blogging
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I can make you think about starting your own blog.

Why? Because you too can have fun with Google trends. Find something in Google’s hottest 100 search phrases and blog about it. You’ll get traffic to your site.

I posted this to put my site in front of people searching for “I can make you thin” (one of today’s hot US searches, according to Google trends). It’s a demonstration of one way of getting traffic to your blog. If you’re thin…king about doing business online, that could be useful to you. :-)

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for Paul McKenna, you’ll find his site here.

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