Rimmers Music – spam hall of shame

March 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Sorry, Rimmers Music but you chose this way of marketing, not me

Rimmers Music

You’ve made me waste my time contacting you to request removal from a list which I never asked to be on in the first place. That’s crappy. Stop and think about what that actually means for a second from my point of view, not yours. Annoyed. To make matters worse, you then failed to honour my requests (via your ‘unsubscribe’ link and via email) – as the picture of my inbox above clearly shows. More annoyed.

The result is that I’m now choosing to tell everyone else about your chosen method of marketing. It’s the easiest way I know of getting your attention and making you accountable for your decision to do your marketing this way. Don’t act surprised and don’t get pissed off  if people find this post when they go searching in Google for ‘Rimmers music’. This  is what happens when you annoy customers and prospects.

To anyone else reading this who isn’t the owner or an employee of Rimmers Music but owns their own business, please take note: firing off emails to lists of people might seem (from your end) to be a smart way to drum up business. It isn’t. This is what happens when you do. Or worse.

At least I’m willing to publish any response from Rimmers Music on this issue (because that’s what I do). Other pissed off customers / prospects who don’t have the professional, balanced interest in online reputation that I do won’t be so generous or fair.

 

Filed Under: feedback, GRRRR!!!, online reputation management

Your video is turned off – Skype

March 24, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Apparently, video is OFF the menu for Mac users since Skype was bought by Microsoft

At least that’s the view out there on the web.


Screen shot 2013-03-23 at 23.02.29If you’ve come here because you’re a Mac user and suddenly, out of the blue, you can no longer use Skype to make video calls, then join the club. You dialled someone, they answered and then Skype shut off your video with the message “Your video is turned off”. That’s annoying but even more annoying is that nobody will tell you why.

This must be (is) happening to hundreds of thousands, if not MILLIONS of Mac Skype users and there is a massive information hole about this on the web.

Screen shot 2013-03-23 at 22.53.40If you go to Skype, you’ll see nothing about this. The only place you’ll find any reference to “Your video is turned off” is in the support forum – with a few exasperated Mac users seeking some kind of answer. Do they get any answer from Skype? No. All they get are a few people in the know saying ‘Mac user? You might as well forget using Skype now that Microsoft has bought it.”

From where I stand, they’re spot on. It seems that Microsoft don’t even consider Mac users worth an explanation.

An added little Skype joke (tell me how this isn’t deliberate) comes when you go to the Mac download page. “Get Skype for Mac” says the link which, when you click it, mockingly downloads “SkypeSetupFull.exe” for you. Yes, that’s right – SkypeSetupFull.exe.

“Start using your shiny new Skype” it taunts you, at the top of the page.

Why not use the comments below to tell Microsoft how much you appreciate their thoughtfulness. As for me, I’ve gone over to Google Hangouts as of tonight. So long Skype and thanks for all the fish.

 

Filed Under: feedback, GRRRR!!!

Drift HD stops recording after 40 minutes…

January 19, 2013 By 2 Comments

But don’t expect Drift Innovation people to tell you.

I bought the Drift HD camera for recording some group sessions at work. The picture quality of the GoPro camera is superior but only the Drift HD has the magical 2.5mm external microphone ‘in’ jack that lets me capture high quality audio from a wireless mic at the same time.

Good quality audio is often overlooked in favour of the image but poor audio ruins more videos than poor image. If you’re trying to communicate (and not just dazzle with snowboard stunts) then audio quality ends up being more important than picture quality. Can you find a reasonable digital video camera with a socket to take an external mic? Can you buggery.

My first experience of the Drift was good; I liked the ‘wide angle view’ but was annoyed that it mysteriously stopped and restarted recording at about 42 minutes into our 90 minute session. I had a big class 10 Micro SD so I couldn’t understand why it was stopping – and restarting. I didn’t want my session in two chunks, dammit, because that meant I had to edit the thing together and that meant hours of struggling MacBook, overheating trying to handle several Gigabytes of video in one go. Not ideal.

I contacted Drift Innovation via a support ticket and via Twitter. I described exactly what was happening: “Stops recording after about 40-42 minutes, consistently, and restarts…why?” Nobody could answer me. Eventually Drift Innovation support came back to me saying “Well, your camera is obviously faulty, you are welcome to send it back”. Which I did for a refund.

I bought another one and it arrived today. I charged it up (4hrs) and then started a recording to see if it would record past 40 minutes. Guess what? It didn’t. I did some more searching until I found, in the small print of the manual pdf, a sentence that says:

“Note: If the video being recorded is very long, the video file will be separated into multiple files every 3.6 GB (i.e. every 40 minutes in 1080p). This is automatic – you do not need to monitor this process. The camera will resume filming after a few seconds, once the file is saved. Please be patient while the file is saving.”

Well, that settles that. Shame that Drift’s support staff don’t know about it.

Filed Under: feedback, GRRRR!!!

MacBook Pro trackpad not working, won’t click, mousepad broken?

January 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Has your MacBook pro trackpad stop working? Does it become unusable when the computer gets hot?

Mine does. Every time I most need to use it. Like on a train, at home or on a plane. Recently, I flew business class to the far east and first class back – the idea being I could work on a particularly important project on the way. Imagine how annoyed I was to get my MacBook pro out, start it up and then find, within minutes that not only couldn’t I use it but that trying to use it was ruining every document I was working on because at a touch, the mouse would stay clicked and drag-and-drop everything everywhere. That’s bits of text inside documents and files, applications and folders outside of documents. Within a minute or two I was swearing aloud in the First Class cabin of a 747, making myself very unpopular.

The problem is, I have since discovered, that the battery expands over time and presses against the track pad, causing it to compress. This gets worse when the computer heats up (hot things expand even more) and when I take the MacBook on an aircraft. I guess this has something to do with pressure but I’m not sure what. All I know is that I can forget trying to work – at least with this great big silver hot water bottle.

Someone on a forum advised taking the battery out and trying to run the MacBook on just mains power. I did this and – presto! – I immediately got back the nice, crunchy, positive, clicky mouse functionality. I also got to handle the battery and was amazed to feel just how expanded and distorted it really is. No wonder the mousepad doesn’t work properly.

So the secret is either to run your MacBook pro on mains only (I’ll remember this next time I need to work on a plane) or grudgingly buy a new, flat, slimline battery and wait for it to become middle-aged in its turn.

Filed Under: feedback, GRRRR!!!

Becky Fuller 01256 306797 C.A.R.S.

November 20, 2012 By 26 Comments

Have you been getting texts from CARS (Credit Link Account Recovery Services)?

If so, is it concerning a service that you no longer wanted and that you cancelled in what you thought was the correct fashion?

My mum got a text message from this company today that insisted she call them ‘urgently’. When she did, they tried to take personal details from her without satisfying her request to know who they were, what they wanted and how come they had her phone number. According to mum, when she refused to answer any more questions their tone became threatening and ended with them telling her she would just have to wait for their letter.

A quick online search on this number reveals a very large number of people who have received similar texts demanding they contact a variety of named ‘people’ at CARS or Credit Link Account Recovery Services. What they all appear to have in common is having been customers of either:

• LoveFilm

• Fitness First

• Vonage

• Vanquis

• Nuffield Health

• Tiscali

• Sky

at some point in the past. What they also all seem to have in common is they were not satisfied with the products and wanted to cancel. One more thing they have in common is that they all say they cancelled either after a month’s trial or after giving the proper notice period. Or, in the case of LoveFilm disks they sent back never arrived back and LoveFilm couldn’t close their account. 

There’s a pattern here that I’ve seen before with a well-known online business directory. This company had passed a pile of accounts to debt collectors who went ahead and did what debt collectors often do; that is, try to bully people into paying. The problem was that the people on the list believed they’d legitimately taken advantage of a clearly-stated offer to cancel after a trial period. Unfortunately, someone at the business directory company appeared to overlook this.

My intervention forced the business directory company and the debt collector to face up to the issue with some of the people concerned and drop their demands for money. By way of a thank you for giving them the stage to do this on, I got threatened by their solicitors – but not before I’d achieved what I set out to do which was to bring their shady practices into the open.

So if you’re being harassed by CARS in connection with LoveFilm or Fitness First and you believe that you cancelled in good faith according to the terms of your agreement with them, please share your experience by commenting below. My purpose here is not to give you any legal or technical advice but to provide a platform for people to share and compare experiences and in doing so, throw some light on what’s going on.

I insist on being fair so that CARS, LoveFilm and Fitness First are also welcome to comment and address any issues raised.

Update from my mum:

“I called Lovefilm. They do use C.A.R.S but, after acknowledging that I did cancel my trial well within the the time limit, they promised to “share my concerns” with their relevant departments. They also said they did not want to be associated with such “un-orthodox” practices. Hmmm..”

Hmmmm indeed.

Filed Under: GRRRR!!!, online reputation management, scam warning

When Google confuses me

October 12, 2012 By 2 Comments

Stats show people arriving on my site having searched for ‘viagra dick’

WTF?

I regularly check my blog stats, particularly the list of phrases that have brought Google searchers to it. I was a little surprised to find this morning that someone had – apparently – arrived here after searching for ‘viagra dick’. “When did I write about that?” was the first question I asked myself (because it’s entirely possible that in some ranting blog post about spam I did).

So I put the phrase into Google and ran through the first 30 pages of results but, unsurprisingly, couldn’t find any entries from my site in there. As you’d expect, the first million pages are full of scammers trying to ‘sell’ viagra online.


So I’m left wondering how this happened at all. Let’s imagine I did use the phrase in one of my rants and that that post appears on page 544,839 of the Google search results. Since no human would search that long – not even one looking to scam people – I can only think that it’s some kind of automated thing going on.

Of course, by even writing this means that I’ve now moved up to page 544,727 of the search results for ‘viagra dick’. I think I’d better stop while there’s still time :-)

 

Filed Under: GRRRR!!!, smile

Felix Baumgartner full space jump video

October 11, 2012 By 4 Comments

If you’re looking for a full video of Felix Baumgartner making a jump – any jump – you’ll be sorely disappointed.

** Update! Good news! CLICK HERE for a bit of it from Liveleak TV!! 

So you go looking for video of Felix Baumgartner making his current stratospheric free-fall jump – you know, the 120,000 foot one that everyone’s talking about in traditional and social media. Oh, it’s been aborted, postponed, delayed or whatever? Ok. Fair enough. Then you notice he’s supposed to have done a 70,000 foot one in March 2012? Ok let’s go watch that instead, after all one very high jump is like another visually, right?

Ah. You find this supposed jump (which, if I recall correctly was itself cancelled, aborted and postponed at the time after a huge amount of Red Bull hype and build up) but guess what? You can’t find any of the hi-def footage that you know must exist – since that was the whole point, right?

If you’re stupid – like me – you spend a full 5 minutes looking on YouTube for footage of this test jump; to see the video that everyone wants to see: the moment he leaves the capsule and, heck, why not: some footage of his view on the way down. Even with a GoPro camera strapped to him like the ones those students send up every week on their little ‘edge of space’ projects the footage would be awesome. But there’s nothing. Nothing but carefully edited promotional pieces designed to tantalise you. Lots of build up in the American TV style; a fade to black at the money-shot of Felix about to go out the porthole, then grainy shots of a parachute intercut with Felix puffing up just how dangerous this all is / was.

So can I give you some advice? Forget looking for the video of any of Felix Baumgartner’s stratospheric space jumps unless you want to be manipulated by the Red Bull marketing people into an endless search where all that happens is you never get what you’re after while they certainly get what they’re after: the chance to expose you to Red Bull brand time and time again as you jump from one YouTube video to the next.

Personally, I’ll wait 30 years for the stills of this. If I want to feel like I’m in space, I’ll watch one of those student videos instead. Far more satisfying an experience and free from cynical marketing manipulation.

Alternatively, you can wait for the BBC/ National Geographic ‘documentary due out some time in November. That show, like the recent one about crashing a Boeing 727 in the Mexican desert will no doubt also feel like it has more to do with making money than with making good science or, in the case of our Felix, even making good history.

Filed Under: business insight, critical approach to online media, GRRRR!!!

BT customer service: the difference between on- and off-line

October 8, 2012 By 4 Comments

There’s a huge gulf between BT’s online and offline customer service experience

Recently I found myself with an unexpected bill from BT for an old internet product they had switched me from back in 2009. (The fact that I had to demand to be switched from the old substandard BT-Yahoo product to the new BT Total Broadband that everyone else was on was pretty poor customer service in its own right. To have ‘forgotten’ to switch me off the old service was poorer still.)

Anyway, on receiving the erroneous bill I wasted 30 minutes getting nowhere with BT’s customer helpline. I ended up somewhere in India (as you do with BT) speaking to someone who, despite their desperation to please, had no hope of understanding my problem. This was both a language and a complexity problem. The poor guy couldn’t grasp the nuances of the problem I was describing and ended up by chucking me back into the call queue after 30 minutes.

So I did what smart people everywhere are doing (except the really smart ones are doing it first, without wasting time in the call queues). I Tweeted @BTCare and made the problem public.

Within minutes my Tweet was picked up by (I’m guessing) a UK-based social media customer service guy who took up my issue, continued the conversation on email and resolved the issue for me. “If only all BT customer service people had the ability and the power to intervene they give to their Twitter monitors” I Tweeted, a view I expressed to the BTCare person who called me (yes, you read it right called me) about the issue a couple of weeks later.

You can guess what he said, can’t you? Exactly. “Don’t bother with the telephone helpline in future. Just come straight through on Twitter”.

You betcha, BTCare. I don’t care if that means your social media customer service people will be swamped by Tweets as the world and his brother wake up to the fact that this is the only way to get good customer service out of BT. That’s the way it should be.

Looking for great customer service from BT and immediate action on your problems?

Tweet @BTCare, the only place to get customer service from BT. 

Filed Under: critical approach to online media, feedback, GRRRR!!!

No No Reviews – hairy stories from Google

June 1, 2012 By 3 Comments

Someone is gaming the system when it comes to reviews for No No Hair Removal

In a break in ‘The Wright Stuff’ today on Channel 5 I was struck by an ad for the ‘No! No!’ Hair removal system / gadget. I loved the claim that the product removes hair better than other methods (shaving, waxing, electrolysis) and with ‘virtually’ no pain. “If this actually worked, it would be a runaway success” I thought to myself. “Let’s see”

So I went to Google to find out.

Look at the pattern of review score in Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com sites:

It’s clearly overwhelming negative. I don’t know about you, but I tend to trust Amazon reviews marginally more than I trust everything else online for two reasons: 1) Amazon has a vested interest in making sure their system is trustworthy and 2) As a result the reviews are written by people who have bought and used the product. By comparison, everything else online is likely to be ‘gamed’ by the company in question. More and more these days, this activity consists of employing armies of young ‘social media-savvy’ people to blog, Tweet, ‘review’ the product favourably to flood Google with positive reviews.

Remember, there are millions of pounds and dollars at stake here – so paying people to fake a positive online reputation can, for some companies represent a better investment than actually making sure the product is any good in the first place.

And take a look at the sponsored ads. There appears to be one for No No at Amazon.co.uk that shows an average review rating of 4.6 stars. What?!? We already know that in really it scores an average 2* in real Amazon reviews. So what IS this ‘sponsored Amazon ad’ referring to? On closer inspection it turns out that other No No products (costing a fraction of the nearly £200 of the No No Hair removal system) score higher marks. It appears the sponsored result at the top of Google then is referring to an aggregate of all of those products.

A wider review of Google results suggests that No No has done quite a bit of work to get their own glowing reviews out there into Google to offset the Amazon review trends.

But I’m left with the same basic question: how can it be that when it comes to the right to make claims on daytime TV, your own propaganda and a fistful of cash are all you require to be allowed to say what you like? If you’re angry at the claims made by this company – a view shared by the vast majority of Amazon reviewers of this product – then please feel free to express your views here.

Do I have a vested interest? No. I’m for truth and accountability. If your product is sh*t and the consumer is telling you so, then you don’t have the right to continue making claims you cannot back up in reality.

Filed Under: business insight, critical approach to online media, GRRRR!!!, online reputation management Tagged With: , ,

Skrobbler iPhone sat nav2 app thinks I’m in Berlin, Germany

April 21, 2012 By 2 Comments

Sat Nav2 app by Skrobbler starts off by not working, then sends me the wrong way when it does

I’m not a great fan of apps because, like a lot of things online, they’re great at taking your money but often rubbish at customer support or explanation.

I bought Skrobbler’s Sat nav2 app and tried it out at home. Even on my ropey 3G connection at home, the map / route part of the app seemed quite able to locate me and plot a route from A to B without a problem. But hitting the ‘Navigation’ button (to use the app as a talking SatNav rather than as a GoogeMaps equivalent) just didn’t seem to want to work. The app repeatedly assumed that my location was the center of Berlin.

Now I’ve nothing agains Berlin but not very helpful if my SatNav can’t tell my start point. This plus the somewhat counter0-intuitive user interface had me swearing at Skrobbler a lot this morning.

A quick search online shows I wasn’t alone in this. A number of 1* reviews on the iTunes app store say the same. As do posts in the Skrobbler Support Forum.

Later, I went into town and tried the app out from there. To my surprise, it seemed to work. Except that it tried to direct me the wrong way to get home. Not completely wrong but petrol-wastingly-unnecessarily wrong.

That doesn’t inspire me to spend any more money on ‘offline’ map packs. I learned one thing today about buying apps and it’s this: when you’re in the iTunes app store, make sure you filter the reviews by ‘Most Critical’ first and read them all. I wish I had. I know it’s only a couple of quid but it’s still money.

Filed Under: critical approach to online media, feedback, GRRRR!!!
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