Out of the blue this site stopped displaying properly the other day. It was based on a premium theme called ‘Venture’ that I’d bought maybe two years ago. Everything had worked well and I had no complaints – until the other day. The first thing I did was make sure that all my content was still intact. Then I switched to another (free) theme in my WP dashboard which worked fine meaning that it was Venture was somehow broken.

I went on a quick search to try to find who I’d bought Venture from and when. The trail led me to StudioPress – along with the name Brian Gardner. That was strange. I’d used a lot of Brian’s themes (free and paid) but I was sure that ‘Venture’ came from a stable called ‘ModThemes’. To be honest, there have been so many of them I’ve lost track.

It turned out that Venture was now under the StudioPress umbrella. I contact tech support (not expecting much) and was really happy to get back an email offering me another theme plus their ‘Genesis’ platform – for free. True to their word, I got another email back today with a link to a download – ‘Agency’.

I’d like to say that this piece of good customer service has won me back as a StudioPress customer – except it seems that I’ve never actually been away. Nice move Brian and the team! Thanks!

Yes – using the ‘share’ function.

Just now, I got an item in my stream from one ‘Mac MacPherson’. From looking at this ‘incoming’ item, you can clearly see that Google+ lets people who you don’t know and who don’t know you push things at you. Great.

So I tried it out myself. Here’s how you do it. First, publish your piece of mega-spam to your stream. Make sure it contains plenty of calls to actions and links to your Viagra store or Forex trading platforms (or whatever else you’re pushing at people).

1) When you’ve published your lump of spam, click the ‘share’ link underneath it.

2) Delete any circles

3) Start to type ANY name you like in the circle / name field (G+ will kindly fill it for you with tons of people you don’t know and who don’t know you)

4) When you’ve finished adding names, click the green ‘Share’ button

5) Those people will get a notification in their stream that you want to share something with them. They either have to view your post or they can choose to delete it by clicking the little ‘x’

However, the cute bit is that even if they choose to delete you from their stream, they will still have got a notification email from the Google+ noreply containing the full content of your spamming post.

Unless Google does something about this, I think we can expect G+ to drown in a deluge of spam.

Quite some time ago I noticed ‘The Good Garage Scheme’ when waiting at my local garage. I asked the owner about it. He told me straight that the only way a garage could be ‘in’ the scheme was by agreeing to stock certain engine treatments. What???!!? Being a fan of honest, credible feedback, this naturally made my ears prick up.

I did some research at the time and, sure enough, he appeared to be right. I blogged about it (generously NOT using the name ‘Good Garage Scheme’ in my title to give them the benefit of the doubt) and then left it alone. Today, however, alerted by a Google search bringing traffic to this site, I found the following recent online review:

“If you’ve never heard of the good garage scheme …well it’s a scheme that any garage can join as long as they sell certain products endorsed by the company behind the scheme. They have a website where you can find good garage scheme garages and also , the most important I thought, leave reviews about the garages you visit. Now if you check their website it would be impossible to find any negative reviews posted for any garage that belongs to their scheme. On the other hand most people would probably think that this is because all the garages are good indeed and that’s why there is no bad reviews. That’s not the case though.

I live in St Albans and I decided to visit xxxx xxx x x xxxxx in St Albans to do a simple wheel alignment. The service I got was horrible. There was a 17 year old kid doing the wheel alignment while the boss ( the mechanic) was sitting in his office with his feet on his desk chatting on his mobile phone.Needless to say that the kid messed it up big time and my car was driving in a straight line with the steering wheel at an angle of 20 degrees!!!!! I complained to the mechanic who immediately tried to blame it on my car and a faulty steering wheel. That was not the case though. He did the wheel alignment and he got the car perfect which proved the point that the kid didn’t know what he was doing and in fact he put my life in danger.

Anyway , this is not a review of xxxxx x xxxx xxxxx who are completely irresponsible and dangerous. I tried to leave a negative review for this garage on the good garage scheme website but of course there was nothing posted and my review will never be posted. This is just a scam scheme. What is the point of posting only positive reviews and ignoring negative ones.

I think that trading standards and the watchdog should have a look at this scheme. In the meantime just run away from any garage under this scheme.”

As I discovered the first time I looked into this, the scheme is operated by Forte – a company supplying high-price, high-margin ‘emission-control’ fuel additives to the garages in the GoodGarageScheme system.

We think this is fundamentally dishonest.

The results? Standards of customer care and quality of work that are worse than non-participating garages!

Yes, in a recent Which? survey Good Garage Schemes performed WORST of all in a test in which cars with a list of basic faults were presented at a range of garages. Check out the Independents’ report on this here – and note the poor GGS performance.

I made the mistake of buying a laptop for my son’s 18th birthday from Dixons.

As I checked out, I was given a delivery slot of 23rd of Dec between 5 and 8pm. As it happened, we weren’t able to be home at that time but there was no note to indicate that a delivery had been attempted.

On Christmas eve, I tried to login to Dixons’ website to track my delivery. When my password didn’t work. I initiated a password reset. Twice. I didn’t receive an email from either. I also found that I had no confirmation of purchase emails either. A friend thinks this has to do with my email hosting provider. Maybe – but I think it may have to do with Dixons not sending them in the first place.

Today, I headed for Dixons’ website to begin the painful process of trying to contact Customer Services. I say painful because according to the reviews I’ve since read, I’m going to be in for a miserable time. I was concerned to find the website down – leaving only that distinctly unprofessional landing page. I checked out @dixonsonline on Twitter but found only a cheery message from Christmas Eve. Talk about missing the point of social media. What’s the point in staying silent when people most need to hear from you?

UPDATE 28th December

I blogged about this problem (no response). Tweeted about it (no reply). I went to Get Satisfaction – a forum that connects people needing customer service with the businesses they’re customers via a highly visible pubic platform – and found a lot of other people very unhappy at Dixons’ service. I also noticed some very good customer service agents at work there, to the company’s credit.

I lifted the email address of one of their agents from someone’s thread and emailed her directly outlining the situation and inviting her to help.

Within a couple of hours I had a response. A very efficient, polite and helpful response too. Hopefully, they’ll sort out my missing laptop tomorrow and deliver it to my son’s address…

I am impressed by the skills of the people representing Dixons on the Get Satisfaction website. I don’t think, however, that many people would find their way there as it’s not clearly linked from Dixons’ website and, when all’s said and done, if Dixons’ are paying cheap and employing rubbish couriers to deliver, then they deserve the reputation it seems they’re getting.

If you’re stuck, I can heartily advise going to Get Satisfaction and talking to the Dixons people on there. They, at least, know how to treat people well – thanks!

I’ve been staying in Premier Inns quite a bit on business over the last month. Nothing wrong with them. As I said in a Tripadvisor review, they do all the basics just about right. But something occurred to me tonight, while I was ironing my shirt for tomorrow’s sessions.

When you’re away on business, and unless you’re wealthy and staying in the very best hotels, ironing a shirt in preparation for doing business the next day is a vital part of getting ready. I don’t know about you, but I can face just about anything with a nice quality, well-ironed shirt.

So why do hotels pay this vital activity so little attention? Why is the equipment they provide of the lowest quality?

In the case of Premier Inn, the irons and boards are kept in ‘Guest Services’ cupboards on each floor. No problem with that but it goes downhill from there. The iron & board combo is a fiendish contraption of a regular (if cheap) steam iron shackled by a curly wire to a metal holder unit fixed to the board.

The problems this arrangement causes are staggering. First, you can’t fill the iron with water. Why? Because there’s no container in your room with a spout. Using a glass results in nothing but a soaked floor. You can’t take the iron to the bathroom – without taking the entire ironing board with you, which is what I ended up having to do. Once there, you STILL can’t hold the iron under the tap – but you CAN now use the glass (spilling gallons of water safely down the sink in the process). Finally the iron has water in it. And now the real fun begins.

Premier Inn has managed to buy the kind of cheap steam iron that, no matter what setting you have it on, leaks water copiously onto your shirt as you go, leaving great stripes of sodden cotton in its wake. These streaks then promptly soak up all the stains on the ironing board underneath (which, of course, isn’t covered in any periodically replaceable fabric cover, but the basic ‘silver’ heat resistant cover).

That’s not the end of things. There you are, ironing yellow stains into the nice clean white shirt that you managed to get the entire length of the country without getting dirty when you realise that the restraining cord is causing the electrical cord to drag sideways against your shirt along the edge of the board. This rucks up the shirt (where you’ve already ironed it), causing immediate and permanent creases.

There are two main lessons here. The first is that this hotel (like so many) fails to spot the opportunity to improve my experience because it doesn’t stop to think about the situation from the customer’s point of view. The second and more important lesson is that to treat everyone else like criminals because someone once stole a cheap iron from you is very short-sighted.

When you’re out and about tomorrow, take a look at how much of the world around you – from the buildings you work in to the processes and systems you use – is built to accommodate the worst possible kind of person, not the best. The worst passenger, the worst employee, the worst patient, the worst consumer.

Then ask yourself: “Do I do this too?”

I’ve been complimentary about First Great Western in the past for good reason. The fares from Plymouth to London are reasonable (by comparison with the rest of the country); the staff have always been very friendly even in the most trying of conditions and by and large they’ve got me to London and back on time, safely and in reasonable comfort.

The only areas where First Great Western gets it wrong are the online booking system and – worse – the refunds system.

If you’re just booking one ticket every few months it’s bearable. If, however, like me you have to book a month’s worth in advance you’re heading for trouble. Booking the tickets is slow but reasonably workable. You plod through adding one ticket at a time and then pay for them all in one go. You then get the option to text the booking reference for each journey to your phone. Fiddly but not impossible.

Picking up your tickets is a game of getting your phone out, getting your credit card out and finding the right booking reference amongst multiple booking reference text. Assuming you get that right, you’re on your way.

The real trouble begins if you have to try to change a booking and get a refund. It’s bad enough trying to do it for one, but for several it becomes a nightmare.

At the beginning of the month, I booked 4 return journeys. A week later, something came up at work and I had to travel to different locations throughout the month, with the result that only 50% of my month’s journeys already booked were still relevant.

‘Super advance’ tickets of the kind I’d booked cannot be refunded directly. You can, however, get a refund (minus £10 administration fee) providing you re-book the same journey on a different date AND you pay the new fares at the point of booking. IF you send the printed tickets by recorded delivery to Edinburgh you will then get the refunds (- £10 for each booking) credited back to you.

In my case, I had to call the helpline in India to change 3 journeys. To prepare for this call required printing out this and next month’s diary in order to choose days on which I would rebook the new journeys. I also had to have to hand the original online booking references for each of the bookings I wanted to change. This all took about 30 minutes of intense concentration to find.

The call itself took 18 minutes. Booking by booking, I had to give the original reference number, specifiy which journey I wanted to change, specify the date and time of the new journey, give my debit card details and recieve a NEW online booking code. I repeated this process 3 times (save repeating the card number).

By the end of the hour, I had 3 new 1/2 journeys booked into next month (meaning that when I come to book that month, I had to omit booking those parts of my month’s travel); I’d lost £30 in administration fees, received 3 new online booking codes which I have to write into my phone by hand AND earned myself a trip to the Post Office (time I can’t afford tomorrow) to send – at great cost – my old tickets to a PO Box in Edinburgh. Oh, and I ended up with bookings next month NOT in the quiet carriage because the Indian booking office clearly doesn’t have access to the seat allocations in the quiet coach.

So what was my payoff for all that trouble? £60 refunds redeemed against some oddly booked single journeys next month.

Sorry, First Great Western. I can’t help but think you’ve set it up this way to avoid having to give any refunds. I should know. I just tore up one £36 ticket that I didn’t use last week simply because at the time I was too busy to face the hassle of trying to get a refund on it.

Proof you can use a laptop in a VoloTV seat

Earlier this week I found myself in a train seat staring at a newly-installed VoloTV screen that was unexpected, a bit too close for comfort and impossible to switch off.  The 3 colleagues travelling with me felt the same – so, by way of feedback, covered the screens with large-scale bright orange Post-It notes saying how we felt.  Later, I blogged and tweeted about it.

The next day, I got a call from Yeshpaul Soor, the MD of VoloTV thanking me for the feedback (‘I’ve got your notes here in my office’) and assuring me that he was resetting ALL the VoloTVs in the First Great Western network so that the customer (and non-customer) alike will be able to switch it off.  He then invited me to visit the VoloTV office to learn about the system and get set up for some free viewing on my trip home to Plymouth.

Simple online reputation done really well:

1) Monitor the web for news items, blog posts and particularly Twitter tweets about your business

2) Go out of your way to connect with those people – pick up the phone!

3) Admit what you’ve done wrong and offer to put it right

4) Go the ‘extra mile’ to win the respect of your critics

And the extra ingredient?

Having first chosen to locate VoloTV in the distinctly unglamorous bowels of Paddington Station, Yeshpaul Soor then made it his business to get to know everyone there – from the gateline staff to the train cleaners.  The same cleaners who picked up our feedback notes and took them to him within 30 minutes of our having written them.

Is VoloTV for me? Not really – but that’s just a matter of taste, and with a business model that only needs 7% of passenger journeys to pay, VoloTV can afford me not to be a paying customer. I found myself listening to several episodes of Outnumbered while Tweeting and playing Scrabble on my iPhone. The sound and picture quality is great but I’m not much of a TV watcher at the best of times. About the only thing I did look up for was highlights of a 2006 football match between Liverpool and Arsenal where Peter Crouch scored a hat-trick and got to keep the match ball. Nice.

I suspect that I’ll carry on booking myself into the Quiet Carriage for my journeys but one thing’s certain: with a willingness to listen to and act on difficult feedback, VoloTV has earned my respect and improved it’s online reputation at the same time.

For some time I’ve been thinking that the anonymous user review + the competitive environment of Google search = a disastrous formula for all concerned.  Why? Because anonymity pretty much guarantees that reviews end up being used to ‘game’ the market. This isn’t me being negative about human nature, this is just pragmatism.  If 97% of all email sent everyday is spam…well, you get what I’m saying.

Now, Google is going to put user reviews into the search results beneath paying advertiser’s ads. But which reviews? Apparently, those that come from a ‘closed’ system provided by a partner,  Bazaarvoice.com.  According to this report, review information will only be added from a review system if the organisation using it agrees.

(picture from Earthblog News)

So who’s going to want truly open and potentially critical reviews turning up in the search results next to their carefully crafted, paid-for Google ads?  Er, no-one. They’re going to want nice reviews that will make their ads look more attractive. Bye bye transparency.

All of which continues to make a mockery of the noble ideas about feedback and transparency that social media pundits like to talk about. The true value of feedback in business (as in life) is its role in driving learning, development and change but Google – like every other business dealing in ‘user generated reviews’ – is only interested in feedback as a commodity it can trade to businesses seeking competitive advantage.

So what’s Google doing adding reviews to paid ads in the search results? Just more of what it’s always been doing from the start: converting human knowledge into cash via the technology of the ‘keyword’.

Don’t be evil? Don’t make me laugh. I can’t help think that Google has been nothing but – and that we’ve colluded with it every step of the way

First of all, I expect this post to bring some responses from various people behind the reputation monitoring tools that I’m going to mention.  You wouldn’t expect anything else, right?

I’m posting because I’ve now tried out a few of these tools and I just can’t make sense of them.

Of course, that could all be down to me.  On the other hand, it could be something they’re doing wrong.  I genuinely don’t know which it is.

I started with Reputation HQ.  When I tried it out over a year ago, I quickly ground to a halt. It’s all very bright green, sexy social media. Seems like it’s geared up for a team of people to rate and comment on any references found following a search.  I did a search, got some results… then (if memory serves me) just got confused.  I tried communicating with the the support people – who, to be fair, were trying really hard to be helpful – but I just couldn’t get them to understand what it was I couldn’t understand.  In short, after the first search it just wasn’t clear what you would do next – or why. I wanted to get a sense of what it could do and whether or not there was a package I could use to service my clients (rather than resell to my clients).  After repeated attempts to work out what it could do over several weeks I gave up.  Verdict?  I’ll just do regular searches in Google and use Google Alerts.

Next I tried a Trackur trial. Sign up, type in my keyword search and hit Enter. It returned some results but only a fraction of what a regular Google search would return for the same term.  I was able to rate the things it found (good, neutral, bad) but that was it.  Again, what next?  Trackur tells you that if you save the search term it will search every 30 minutes and implies that over time, it will find more and more.  So I saved the search term.  Week after week I’ve come back to it. No more references found, no idea how or when it will start to do those promised advanced searches.  Do I need to leave my laptop on and the browser window open? And what will I do next?  No idea.  Result?  I’ll just do regular Google searches and use Google Alerts.

I signed up for a lite version of Brands Eye. The guy behind the tool, South African Tim Shier was as helpful as can be.  I put in the search term, hit enter and got a pile of useful results.  This tool was the most intuitive of the three – allowing me to find references and rank them as relevant or irrelevant.  It showed me graphs of mentions per day and pie charts of relevant vs. irrelevant.  But the same problem applies: not only can I find more references by doing a Google search (which is more relevant anyway since that’s the search your average punter would be doing), but the interface logic is completely confusing and leaves me with no idea of what I should do next.

The same applies to a range of other tools: MonitorThis (which returned me a fraction of the references I could find in Google for a particular keyphrase) and uberVU (which looks really interesting with its focus on following conversations but which in fact finds just one reference out of hundreds in Google) for example. EntityCube seems interesting too, but I challenge you to work out what it’s doing.

Now I know that the people behind these tools are explorers in a new world and I know there’s a lot of work and passion gone into these things.  But here I am, working in online reputation management with plenty of off- and online business experience and I’m telling you that I can’t make these things work for me.

As I write this, I’ve a reply to a question from Andy Beal himself at Trackur (via Get Satisfaction) – thanks Andy.  The problem is that the problem itself can’t be described – or answered – in text form.  It needs a conversation.

The first problem is that I can’t get any of these tools to find even half of the references that a Google search will find about the person or business whose reputation I’m evaluating. Since a company’s prospects will themselves do a Google search surely that’s a problem? I don’t know whether these tools are finding everything that’s out there… or everything that’s changed today… or pinged… or …or… I don’t know.

The second problem is that none of these tools tells me clearly what I can use them for – in common-sense language. They all assume I know already.  They similarly don’t tell me what to do with anything they produce in their searches.  I’m sure the designer has plenty of ideas about it, but I don’t.

A third problem is the interface design which follows a logic and uses terms that, again, probably make sense to the designer, but not to me the newcomer.

All of which means that I’m left using Google searches to monitor clients’ reputations which, given all the above, seems to work perfectly well.  The only thing it doesn’t do, of course, is produce the sentiment metrics that the bigger tools try to – sentiment metrics which are assumed to be the key to convincing big business to pay for, er.. reputation management and monitoring.

I can’t help thinking that there must be something wrong if someone in my position can’t get these tools working for me.

Choosing the right email marketing software isn’t easy. Anyone can put up a site and create a slick impression but it’s only when you’ve committed your money that you find out you’re dealing with chancers operating out of their bedrooms.

If you’re not particularly techie but want a service that you can pick up and use, you’re going to be disappointed.  For a start, whatever service you’re using you’ll find out that even creating a newsletter from a standard template isn’t a simple, drag and drop affair, far less editing a template to customise it.

I suspect that’s the biggest surprise the non-techie business person gets: nothing in the world of HTML and email is ‘what you see is what you get’ meaning that unless you understand something of HTML and php editing you’re going to struggle to to build a good looking newsletter.  Which, of course, is why people leave it to agencies.

But once you realise that and learn enough to bend a template into something that suits you, there’s still a massive spread of difference between services.

I’ve only used two packages – but they’re a world apart.  The first, GraphicMail appealed simply because of its name and the fact it had a ‘.co.uk’ at the end.  Hey, I thought, I’d prefer a UK person to help me out when I inevitably get into trouble.  On the plus side, GraphicMail is a low cost service, coming in at something like £9.95 a month for 2000 email sends. That seems simple enough – although (unbelievably) there is no ‘buy’ button on their site.  After giving them some (clearly unwelcome) feedback to that effect, I was told that you had to sign up for a free account and convert it to paid.  So what if I’d used it before and knew what I wanted?  No answer.

Once aboard, the GraphicMail editing interface is clunky.  There are plenty of free templates to get started with and you use the online editor to make any changes to the template and to the content.  For a relative novice, it’s pretty unfathomable, resulting in continuously losing the whole template when accidentally (clumsily) deleting some CSS div or something or other.  To be fair, my ineptitude isn’t GraphicMail’s fault but other systems (see below) anticipate this and do a far better job of minimising the risk of losing everything.

I sent a campaign from GraphicMail (eventually) after an unacceptable delay resulting from awful signposting on their site and a dreadful customer service conversation via chat.

Two days later, I decided to look for a better service.  This time I read a ‘top 10 email newsletter systems reviewed’ list – from which GraphicMail was noticeable by it’s absence.  Top of the list was Campaign Monitor, so I signed up to give it a go.

The whole experience was different from the beginning.  The site is calm, professional and every part of it is so logically laid out that it anticipates what you need to do before you need to do it.  Campaign Monitor is clearly designed for the professional design / web agency who wants to run multiple email campaigns for multiple clients.  That immediately appealed to me, as I have at least three clients I needed to create campaigns for.

What also struck me about Campaign Monitor was that it soon became apparent that it would let me have an account, create various campaigns, import all my mailing lists and then charge at the point of sending.  Something about that just makes sense.  Why?  Because with Campaign Monitor, by the time you come to send your campaign, it will have filled you with such confidence that you’ve made the right choice, you’ll pay without hesitation.

And here’s a lovely touch: you pay by credit card for however many you send.  No ongoing fees.  Just pay as you send.  How customer-focused and sensible.  Alternatively, you can buy a pile of credits up front and just use them to send.  It’s a flat fee of $5 per mail-out (or ‘campaign’) plus 1c for each email sent.

So far, everything about Campaign Monitor works brilliantly.  Templates are edited offline (with Dreamweaver or some such software) and imported back into your account.  The beauty of this is that it means Campaign Monitor doesn’t struggle to live edit your templates AND your content online.  It concentrates on just handling your content.

The only niggle I have with it is that when it came to creating my content, I found myself having to add images to my newsletter via HTML and switching back.  That’s right, there’s no ‘image upload’.  And then, of course, I realised why:  Campaign Monitor isn’t there to serve your images to clients; that’s something you have to do.  That, when you stop and think about it is a smart move (what jobbing web designer wouldn’t have their own server space?) and would also deter the ‘casual’ or inexperienced newsletter creator.

And, when all’s said and done, that kind of makes sense.  Campaign Monitor is an easy-in, confidence-inspiring tool that will deter the unscrupulous spammer but welcomes the web agency or designer looking to service a range of clients.  It even has clever options for sub-billing, allowing for mark up for email costings. I have no idea about Campaign Monitor’s customer service (I’ve had no reason to need to contact them) although the whole set up of this service leads me to believe it would be good.  GraphicMail, by contrast, distinguished itself by my needing to contact them more than once – and giving some truly, memorably, bad customer service in the process.

Enough said.  Campaign Monitor.  You won’t be disappointed.