Archive for business insight

TripAdvisor: sliding down the trust curve?

Aug 21 | by Sam Deeks | business insight, online reputation management
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TripAdvisor changes its logo yet again in the face of reality.

For a long time I’ve been watching TripAdvisor. This online hotel review site is a classic ‘user generated content’ business: it has to juggle making it easy for users to add content (reviews) from a position of effective anonymity, with trying to ensure those reviews aren’t gamed for advantage (or disadvantage). It has to try to do these while avoiding litigation from hotel owners and disgruntled travellers alike. And it has to somehow make the content relevant enough to drive valuable and qualified traffic to parent company Expedia.

As I’ve said previously, I think this is an equation that can’t possibly work out. Not particularly because TripAdvisor is doing something wrong, but because you simply can’t mix anonymous reviews with commercial interests and create ‘trust’.

Without trust, a business like TripAdvisor has nothing.

While the ‘downgrading’ of its strapline from claims about truth and objectivity (what the traveller REALLY needs) to claims about itself being a big site (who cares??) is at least realistic, it’s a shame. It goes to prove that somewhere in TripAdvisor, the decision has already been made not to try to build a business with trust at its core and to pursue a shorter term strategy instead.

Why shorter term? Because many people using TripAdvisor or watching it professionally get the impression that hotel owners (and others) are gaming the system. Given the precariousness of the economy and the struggle that most hotels are experiencing, it is hardly surprising that many will seek to raise their standing in what is still the most frequently-consulted hotel review site.

Tripadvisor RSS feeds: dumped, apparently…

Aug 7 | by Sam Deeks | business insight, marketing
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TripAdvisor’s quiet dumping of RSS feeds raises interesting issues

RSS – on the surface, a great mechanism for delivering your content to a wider world. In reality – as it appears that TripAdvisor has quietly concluded – completely counter-productive for sites dependent on on-site advertising for their revenues.

For a short time, RSS feeds allowed the traveller to monitor a hotel over time to pick up any worrying reports before booking or travelling. A hotel owner could use RSS to have latest reviews delivered so he could monitor and respond to any potential reputation problems as they arose.

It all sounded good – until somebody at TripAdvisor presumably realised that providing RSS feeds of reviews achieved absolutely nothing except keeping the potential clickers at a distance from the on-site sponsors. Doh.

What’s interesting is that now, if you search Google for Tripadvisor RSS feeds, there’s no clear information. TripAdvisor seems to mumble on a bit about RSS being available at various places on the site, but I didn’t see any when I did a quick search just now.

So if you’ve arrived here trying to work out why something that seemed so useful to the general public suddenly disappeared, the answer can only be that RSS, pushing content TO subscribers doesn’t work with the Google Ad Revenue model.

This also hints at something I’ve thought for a while – that online revenue mechanisms default to the Ad revenue model when direct monetisation or other methods fail.

Social media fatigue

Jun 9 | by Sam Deeks | business insight
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Deeply unfashionable though it might be to admit this, but the truth is I’m bored with social media

I never got into Facebook. I tried to use it for a couple of months but it just infuriated me. The benefits in no way matched the value of my personal data. Despite people telling me “it’s just about being sociable..” I quit over a year ago. That’s not strictly true. I have a Facebook account for my cat where I post pictures of her friends and victims.

I tried to use Twitter for a year or so, but found myself stuck reading tweets from the same hundred and fifty or so people.  It turned out that I wasn’t interested enough to go find more people to follow. Since I never followed anyone who followed me just for the sake of it, my Twitter network stalled about there. And like many people, I got bored of the spam and the social media gurus talking endlessly about…yes, you’ve guessed it, social media.

I joined Xing and connected with a girlfriend from a long time ago,  but apart from that, didn’t use it. I quit Ecademy after a couple of years listening to people bullshitting about their egos and prowess.  I spend a year commenting in 4Networking, UKBF, UKBusiness Labs and other such forums until I got tired of the inevitability that everything online degenerates to argument and abuse.

I still have a LinkedIn profile but, like many people, still don’t quite know why – although I quite like the way that LinkedIn seems to be following the ’softly, softly, catchee monkey’ approach and avoiding the vulgar rush to ‘monetize’ that has characterised most of the other online networks.

I’ve joined and left hundreds of social media sites, without the slightest sense of loss of anything I cared about or couldn’t do without.

Throughout that time, I’ve also been doing more and more work in the real world and less and less in the online world. Coincidentally (not!), my real world network has increased; I’m doing more valuable and fulfilling work and enjoying it far more and I’m learning a lot beside.  The range of opportunities open to me has increased in inverse proportion to the amount of energy and time I’ve spent online.

In the last year alone, I’ve traveled to India, Taiwan, Spain, Norway and the US on real-world business, earning a real world salary and working working on real-world projects with real people. It’s been great and most important of all, it’s been interesting.

I can’t help noticing that the more successful and confident I feel, the less appealing spending time on social media becomes.

Am I alone in that?

Breaking with a difficult client

May 22 | by Sam Deeks | business insight
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Letting a difficult client go can be an uncomfortable process – but it has to be done

This morning, I had a call from someone who is now, finally, an ex-client – and probably an ex-friend as well. The conversation was difficult for both of us but by the end of it, there was a conclusion.

Despite the discomfort, it was vital that we had that conversation and stopped the project because otherwise we’d be carrying this unresolved business forward…probably forever :-)

So what was the difficulty? This client is one of those people who wants a website she can add things to herself, but has no idea about the process required to make one or maintain one. We agreed that I would build a Wordpress site for her.

After several months of trying, I realised that she was never going to get clear about what she wanted.  She changed her mind regularly and we couldn’t stick with one thing long enough for us to develop it properly. The end result is that she has a site, but it’s undeveloped – it’s the last in a series of false-starts. And even if it was complete, she still wouldn’t have the understanding required to use it.

I put in three or four times more time and work than the £400 fee I was paid, but eventually I had to call time on the project and tell her that it wasn’t in either of our interests to continue the process.  I offered to refund her half the money.

I felt it was the fairest solution considering the amount of work I put in set against her expectation of getting a website. I was also grateful that she brought her business to me when times were tight.

Looking back, I realise now that I shouldn’t have accepted her business in the first place – for her sake and for mine.

So how can you avoid it? I think it’s pretty simple. Next time you come across a client you shouldn’t work with, I believe that there will be a little voice inside you saying “Stop! It’s not worth it”

I didn’t listen to that voice. So make sure you do. And make sure that no matter how much you think you need the money, remember that you need peace of mind even more.

In today’s difficult conversation, both of us were working hard to be respectful, self-respecting and calmly assertive about getting our needs met. I’m proud of behaving that way in a difficult conversation – and I hope that she is too.

My #1 business use for Twitter

Apr 25 | by Sam Deeks | business insight, how to
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My #1 business use for Twitter: the Twitter Search Widget

What’s great about Twitter is that everybody uses it in a different way.

For me, the #1 business use of Twitter has got to be the Twitter Search Widget. You can see it in action over there at the bottom of the nav bar on the right (scroll down to see it).  For me, it’s a kind of ‘oxygen’ supply to my website. I’ve set it up to pick up mentions of “online reputation”.

What that gives me is a constant, up-to-the-second flow of interesting links into discussions about online reputation management on my site. I don’t know whether or not readers of my blog use it to link off to other things but I certainly do.  It’s like having your own news stream on tap – and it’s faster and more responsive than any mainstream media channel. Every day, I’ll come to my own website as a jump off point to get into a wider discussion about online reputation management that’s going on out there.

Oddly enough, the Twitter search widget isn’t exactly easy to find unless you’re looking for it.  The link is at the bottom of your Twitter home page titled ‘Goodies’. You set up your search term, tweak how you’d like your widget to appear, then copy and paste the code into your site or blog.

Paying for online news? No, no, five Times NO!

Mar 27 | by Sam Deeks | business insight, change
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But is the Times plan to charge for online news really as bad as it sounds?

From June this year, TimesOnline (currently a free news website) will become two separate sites: the Times and Sunday Times accessible only to paying subscribers. The traditional newspaper market is in freefall and the move to charge directly for subscription to news is seen by many as a pivotal moment in the industry’s history.

In the 15 short years we’ve had the internet in our homes, we’ve become very used to consuming free content and somewhere near the top of the list has been news.  It’s hard enough to market and sell content online as it is but the idea of trying to sell something that’s always been free comes across as madness.

Continue Reading…

BA strike: my recent passenger experiences

Mar 20 | by Sam Deeks | business insight
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After two less-than-ideal experience in the last 6 months, I can’t help but support the strike

If you listened to Willie Walsh, you’d think that the BA cabin crew are striking out of greed and self-interest. If you listen to the cabin crew, on the other hand, you’d think they were striking against the progressive erosion of the service offered to First and Club Class customers.

I’ve been lucky enough to have flown BA twice in the last few months – once back from Mumbai, once return to Houston.  I say ‘lucky’ firstly because I’m always grateful to travel and see more of the world, secondly because I didn’t pay for these trips myself.  I’d be furious if I had.

Continue Reading…

Online reputation management top tip: Don’t REACT!!

Mar 19 | by Sam Deeks | business insight, online reputation management
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Top Tip for managing your online reputation: don’t react.

As useful definition of ‘reaction’ is the ability to do something quickly, and more importantly, without thinking. In the animal world, this looks like a gazelle running like hell just long enough and fast enough to avoid being a leopard’s dinner.

In the human world, it’s more often than not a recipe for disaster.  Of course, there are times you have to react physically without thinking for your own safety. Crossing a road, avoiding a fight… you know the kind of thing. We’ve all been there – but realistically, the times when our safety is really threatened are rare.

Continue Reading…

Online reputation management: do it yourself

Jan 13 | by Sam Deeks | ORM, business insight, how to
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You don’t need sophisticated or expensive packages to monitor and manage your online reputation

It’s not rocket science – you just need the tools that your prospects have got (i.e. Google); the ability to think like them, a dose of humility and a crash course in not being reactive.

Oh, and you need to know there’s a difference between monitoring and managing your reputation.

Online reputation monitoring

The simplest advice for monitoring your online reputation is to start with the FASTEST (and therefore potentially most damaging) channels out there:

1) Set up Google alerts for your name, your company name and products and brands.  Sit back and let Google bring the good – and bad – news to you whenever it hears you being mentioned online.

2) While you’re waiting for Google Alerts to bring you news, go to Twitter and search for your name, your company name and your brands.  It’s the most ‘real-time’ network / source of content there is.  If people are going to rant at the point of dissatisfaction, they’re going to do it via their mobile, and they’re probably going to do it on Twitter.

3) If that’s all clear, next do a search in Google.  Do a broad web search first.  See what comes up in the first couple of pages of Google.  Hopefully, a lot of it will be your web site pages and things you’ve done to market and promote yourself and your products.  If not, sack your web designer :-)

Remember: people use blog posts and forum posts to vent their anger or dissatisfaction. Learn to recognise how these posts and comments appear in the regular web results.

4) To focus entirely on blog content, do a dedicated Google blog search

5) Most of all, learn to think like a customer – an angry one and a prospective one.  When an unhappy customer wants to nail you for not listening,  they’re going to nail you by telling their trusted network how bad you are and follow up by publishing posts and comments online with words like rip-off’ ’scam’ and ‘fraud’ to the end.  They want their experience of you to be found by others researching your company – and now they have the tools to do it within minutes.  Be warned; this stuff can kill your business in a matter of days.

When a prospective customer wants to find out the truth about your company, ‘XYZ consultants’, they’re going to start by searching for ‘XYZ consultants’.  Then they’re going to add the words ’scam’, ‘feedback’, ‘rip-off’, ‘review’ at the end to see what comes up.

To manage your online reputation online successfully, you need to see these words as a code that customers and prospects use to bypass your own (naturally positive) propaganda.  So learn the code – and make sure YOU search the web regularly for these coded references to you and your company.

You wouldn’t believe how many companies’ reputations are in tatters online and yet they don’t even know about it.  It could explain that gradual drop-off in sales they’ve been seeing…

Online reputation management

Managing your online reputation priorities are as follows (listed in order of the amount of your energy you should expend on them):

1) Create the best products and services you can.  This is bleedin’ obvious, but the best way to create and protect a great on- and offline reputation is to do the basics really, really well.

2) When things go wrong, do everything you can to make your customer happy.  That means invite feedback, listen without being defensive, go out of your way to satisfy them

3) When you don’t do 1) and 2) properly, people will punish you online by Tweeting, blogging, forum posting and commenting anywhere and everywhere they can.  Count on it. When you finally find something angry / hostile / nasty (true or untrue) with your online monitoring (see the list above), the first thing you need to do is NOTHING.

4) While you’re doing NOTHING (i.e. not reacting, not getting into a fight to try to defend yourself), you should be getting really honest with yourself about what it is you might have done to create the situation.

5) Then you should be thinking about what you can do to put it right.  What you can do, and what you are willing to do.

6) Then consider approaching the disgruntled punter publicly (in whatever forum or blog his/her comment appears) and a) apologise for not having met their expectations b) apologise if you didn’t listen or respond to their original feedback or complaint.  Listen, I promise you, no matter how bad this makes you feel, you almost certainly didn’t listen the first time round.  If you can do this from a genuine place – i.e. that you really do care about helping this person to feel better about your company, you’ll be amazed what you can achieve.

7) If you’ve reacted dived in with both feet and made things worse, then call us to take the heat out of the situation on 01822 610841.

8 ) Start to create positive online content about you, your company and your brands to balance, and ultimately outweight the negative.  Beware: this only works when that content is genuine and credible.

Paying offshore SEO or Reputation Management Companies to flood Google with superficial stuff about you is a false economy (an expensive one at that!) – it will be transparent to any half-wit looking to find out what a company is really like.

If you want to do it properly, call us on 01822 610841.

Cash for gold? You will always get ripped off

Dec 8 | by Sam Deeks | business insight
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Despite being legal, these cash-4-gold companies will always rip you off

Why? Because they can.  And because they prey on people who need money quick.  The BBCs ‘Breakfast News’ ran a feature this morning.  They had some old gold jewellery valued at £200 and then sent it to each of three different ‘cash 4 gold’ companies.  Each offered around £60 and increased their offers when the reporter refused.

The report showed a horrified and disgusted young woman whose demeanour gave the impression she felt that someone had done something wrong to her by offering so little money for her gold.

Er, like, what did you expect?

The same goes for the explosion of ‘pay day loan’ companies you see advertising everywhere there are desperate, credit-unworthy people needing cash they can’t save from week to week.

They’re not here for your good, folks.  They’re here to take as much money off you as they can without breaking the law.

First law of common-sense: people go into business to make themselves rich, not you.  The gap between how much they can pay themselves and how little they can give you is the measure of how civilised we are (or aren’t).

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