Rimmers Music – spam hall of shame

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.

 

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

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.

Why spam and social media don’t mix


If you’re spamming people and you don’t make it easy for them to get off your lists…

…you’re heading for a potential reputation problem.

There’s nothing more frustrating than receiving spam. Oh, yes – actually there is. It’s receiving spam that you can’t STOP.

You know the kind; no unsubscribe link and no way of contacting the spammer to get them to take you off their infernal lists. Yes, that list you never asked to be on in the first place. Most people just give up and resign themselves to wading through the spam whenever it comes in. Some, like me, take to social media to force the spammer’s hand.

The fellow in the example (see screengrab, right) left me no way to contact him – and that was what really pissed me off. And remember this, when you piss off a member of the public (or for that matter a customer), they aren’t going to be reasonable about it and the longer it goes on, the less reasonable they’re going to be. And if they can’t get hold of you they’ll resort to social media. Because boy, does it work.

Less than two weeks after I blogged about this spammer, the gentleman in question AND the company he works for picked up my less-than-flattering reference to their practices and  got on the phone to me. Good. Now I’ve got your attention. Pity I had to work so hard to get it.

In both cases, I had the opportunity to let them know just how unwelcome their spam was and deliciously, there was nothing in my post they could object to: no libel and no defamation because it was all just fact.

As it happens, both individuals, to their credit, were fairly decent about it when they heard my objection. The spamming gent apologised fairly quickly – and hence I took down the post. So all’s well that ends well – except it will take some months for Google to flush the unflattering entry out of its indexes.

So it’s an important lesson to you folks out there using the internet to market your wares: for your own sakes, don’t spam people. And as a minimum, put an effective and instant ‘unsubscribe’ link on your mails. That way, even if you spam someone by ‘mistake’, you give them the chance to get off your list quickly.

If you don’t…well, you know what can happen. It’s surely not worth it.

Making the bus monitor cry is very, very bad for your reputation

Making the bus monitor cry is going to haunt those kids for a long time

The latest viral story sweeping the web accompanies a video showing school kids cruelly taunting their elderly bus monitor to the point she cries. It’s shot by one of the kids and features the heartless and spiteful voices of four or five others who, emboldened by being together in a pack while the old lady is clearly alone, verbally abuse and physically prod her until she is in tears. It is almost unbearable to watch; certainly you don’t need to watch more than 4 or 5 minutes of it.

The reaction to this video has been both heartening (some $400,000 has been raised to send this lady on holiday or even pay for her early retirement in a matter of a few days) and shocking (how so many of the young people express their disgust in more violent terms than the original act – see the YouTube comments). Some are bizarre and ironic – like this one where a level-headed sounding young man condemns the bullies while casually blowing people away in his on-line sniper game.

If you follow the story through, you’ll see that disgusted classmates have posted the names and phone numbers of the offending bullies online. You can find reactions from the parents, from school officials and – reassuringly – from Greece, NY bus monitor Mrs. Karen Klein herself who was clearly hurt by the experience. My son signed a petition to demand that she doesn’t have to pay tax on her unexpected financial windfall and in doing so, brought it to my attention. I felt moved to send her a Facebook message just saying I felt for her and hoped she could put it behind her.  With luck, she will enjoy her money and the kids responsible will learn a hard, fast lesson.

All of which leaves me marvelling at the sheer speed at which both the kids’ and Mrs. Klein’s lives changed; not just because of an act of bullying (because that goes on all the time, all over the world without anyone seeing it) but because it was filmed on a phone for fun, found its way to the internet and then – from the point of view of the gang of bullies – went spectacularly wrong, spectacularly quickly.

The problem for these kids is that this foolish and cruel behaviour towards their bus monitor (someone who’s job it is to protect them!) is going to haunt them for as long as they live and have a significant impact on their future opportunities. However, a more immediate problem for them may be that there are people out there angry enough to wanted to shorten how long they actually do live. Enraging hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who know your name, your phone number, your school and can easily find you is NOT a smart move in terms of your personal safety alone. In terms of their online reputations, this issue has become international news and featured on so many sites that these kids have no chance of ousting the bad news stories attached to their names and little or no chance of even balancing that information with positive stories (assuming they survive this notoriety and go on to do anything good with their lives).

The morale of this tale isn’t just that bad deeds are always rewarded by bad karma, it’s how quickly one cruel and thoughtless act can damage your reputation beyond any hope of repair and in a way that will haunt you for as long as Google does what Google does.

So you want to bury that bad news about you?

Don’t. You’ll be wasting your time AND throwing money into a bottomless hole

If you do a search for ‘online reputation management’ you will find thousands of people offering services to help you avoid getting into trouble and to get out of trouble when your online reputation is in tatters. This sector didn’t even exist, of course, until Google came along so it’s very young and filled with young, social-media aware people offering a wide range of technological solutions to your woes.

You will also notice that ALL of these people offer the same two services. First, they offer you a reputation-monitoring service (often trying to sell you one kind of software or another). Second, they offer to use SEO (‘Search Engine Optimisation’) techniques to bury the bad news about you so it won’t appear when people search Google for your name, company or products.

These approaches are both fundamentally flawed and here’s why.

Firstly, the ‘reputation monitoring’ solutions are usually build by young, technically-minded, social-media-obsessed people. They are difficult to understand, configure or interpret for most business people above the age of 40. And even when they do make sense, all the do is bring reputation issues to the attention of people. What’s wrong with that you might ask? I’ll tell you.

In my experience, almost every reputation problem has at its core a failure of communication skills on the part of the business concerned. Yes, that’s right: no matter how unfair your customers’ reactions might seem, most problems stem from a lack of listening skills, accountability, empathy, assertiveness or simply politeness on your part. Nothing about the reputation monitoring software sold to you will equip you with the skills the lack of which got you into this problem in the first place. Quite the opposite, in fact. Such reputation management tools don’t teach people how to interact with people better, they simply lead them towards technological solutions.

And that’s the second part of my objection to the dominant approach to ‘online reputation management’. If you do that search, you’ll see that everyone offers to bury the bad news for you. Not to help you understand what went wrong and put it right. No, to bury the bad news. Like a dog covering it’s poop. The same people who sold you the reputation monitoring tool will now offer to push the negative references to you off the first few pages and replace it with positive stuff.

What they don’t admit to themselves (far less tell YOU) is that this promise is a) impossible to deliver and b) completely undesirable for a number of reasons.

This promise is impossible because you cannot ‘spam’ Google indefinitely. No matter how many people in India you have creating bogus blog content online and seeding it with links to good stuff about you, Google’s algorithm is constantly changing to ensure a genuine ‘relevance’ value that will ensure the health of the advertising environment it offers its clients. Online reputation management spammers do not feature in this picture very highly. In simple terms, an online reputation management expert who promises to push off high-profile news reports on, say, the Telegraph’s website is misleading you.

And beyond that it is undesirable for the following simple reasons: firstly because the practice creates a highly-visible ‘whitewash’ effect – a pile of innocuous-looking and meaningless blog-junk floating suspiciously at the top of Google for your name / brand / products. Read individually, the casual reader might pass over these articles but anyone doing due diligence will recognise immediately that you’re covering something up; that you’re trying to bury bad news. And that smell of rotten fish will do more harm than the original problem. Remember, everyone can forgive you screwing up once in a while. But what will turn them away permanently is discovering that when things go wrong, you get dishonest.

And finally – and this is the bit that doesn’t even get a look-in from any online reputation manager that I’ve ever seen – this kind of behaviour is undesirable because in taking the ‘try-to-cover-up’ approach, you miss the biggest opportunity of all: the chance to learn how to do your business differently; how to demonstrate your ability to listen, learn and put things right. This passes up an opportunity to turn critics into advocates and enhance your reputation in the only way that matters: as positive word-of-mouth opinion from people who you have surprised and delighted. And nothing delights people more than a difficult situation turning into a positive experience that leaves them happy.

There are those who might say that if the average businessman with a stinging reputation problem wants nothing more than a quick ‘fix’ then it’s no surprise that the industry jumps to offer him what he wants. I beg to differ: first of all, I don’t think that good business people really do want a quick ‘fix’ when you get under the surface and second, it ain’t no ‘fix’ at all when you examine it more closely.

 

 

How much can you find out from a single phone number?

A huge amount.

Google search, curiosity and the experience to spot patterns

Recently, a caller left a name and a phone number on my voicemail, enquiring about online reputation services. As it was out of hours by the time I got the message I did some checking before I called the person back the next day. I thought that I would share this process with you to show you just how much someone like me can find out about someone like you from a single phone number.

It’s not the individual pieces of information that tell me about you, it’s my ability to read all of them put together; the patterns and connections. And because people generally don’t have that ability, they are also blind to the overall picture of themselves that they communicate through their online activity.

I first Googled the name of the woman who left the message but without any contextualising information, this search didn’t show anything that caught my eye. Nothing popped up saying ‘Jane Smith has x, y or z reputation problem’. So I then Googled the phone number.

That immediately brought up a business in the North of England – the kind of business that my experience told me would be quite likely to have a certain amount of unhappy ex-customers. Lets call it ‘City Solicitors’ (although it wasn’t a solicitors as it happens).  I then Googled that business name and very quickly found some negative comments about them in several high-profile discussion forums – including ‘MoneySavingExpert.com’. Ouch.

“Okay” I thought. “So I know the business and I know the problem they’ve got so I’ve a fairly good idea why they might need to talk to me” but I wanted to find out some more. I widened my search beyond the first couple of pages of the Google search results to try to find out a little more about this business and its history. Then I noticed something.

Link farms

Let’s assume that www.citysolicitors.co.uk was the company’s actual website. The thing that caught my eye, down on page 4 or 5 of Google search results was an entry with the URL ‘www.citysolicitors.org.uk’. That was so similar to the company’s own website that I assumed there was some connection (and my experience also flagged up that it was also likely to be a domain registered in an effort to help solve a reputation problem).

I clicked and went there, finding myself on some kind of WordPress blog. This site had the kind of content on it that told me it was a ‘link farm’. This content is typically text that is either generated by computer or cut-and-pasted by an offshore content-creator. It’s purpose is to fill websites that are not intended to be read by people but to fool Google ‘bots’ into thinking it is credible and relevant. I noticed a large vertical text banner that linked directly to www.citysolicitors.co.uk website. That was interesting. It confirmed that whatever this site was, it was in service of the company with the reputation problems whose employee had left a number on my voicemail.

I concluded that the blog was being used as a ‘link farm’ by an online reputation manager, being paid to try to ‘fix’ City Solicitors’ reputation problem.

I quickly discovered many more such sites with domain names that were variants of ‘City Solicitors’ and all of these sites were clearly being used as link farms.

Link text is the clue

The way that Google works is that for a page to benefit from an incoming link (‘link juice’) from another page, the keywords of the destination page have to be in the link text on the other page. SEO consultants and reputation managers typically set up hundreds of blogs full of vaguely relevant content and place, within that content and those pages, links out to other pages that they want to push up the Google search results for any particular key phrase.

Whoever was working on behalf of City Solicitors was linking to other pages – pages owned by someone else – and trying to push them up the search results. The aim, obviously, was to ‘bury the bad comments’ and push them off P1 of Google. This is what most people with reputation problems want and what most, if not all online reputation management ‘specialists’ promise. Except me, that is. I refuse to do it – and for very good reasons.

When a reputation manager sets up link farms he doesn’t expect anyone to read the content on them; in fact, he doesn’t expect anyone to see them at all. They are not designed to attract readers, just to trick Google. This is why, having created these link farms, the reputation manager tends to use them not just for one client, but for as many as possible – and this led to my next interesting discovery.

Steven White and his top 10 unlucky customers

I noticed at the end of each ‘article’ on these link farm sites there were a whole set of keywords. One of them, repeated again and again, article after article, was ‘city solicitors’ with the link URLs pointing to a range of ‘safe’ pages on other peoples’ sites. But there were more and very quickly, I had a list of his top 10 clients. To confirm my suspicions I ran each of his clients’ names through Google and was able to ascertain exactly what reputation problem each had and why.

And that wasn’t all. This reputation manager had decided that he should also benefit from his own link farms and there was his name linked through to his own website. I recognised it from LinkedIn. Let’s call him ‘Steven White’.

Bad online reputation management

To sum up what I’d found from a single phone number  (plus the knowledge that the caller was interested in reputation management):

• That City Solicitors had an ongoing reputation problem

• That they had employed Steven White to try to ‘bury’ the bad news

• That Steven had created link farms to try to muscle out the bad pages by boosting a range of good pages up the Google search results

• The identity of Steven’s top 10 clients and their reputation problems

What I was also able to conclude was that Steven’s techniques had not only not fixed his clients’ problems the way that he had no doubt promised he could (and that they had no doubt wanted to believe he could), but they had probably worsened them. Why? Because there’s nothing so suspicious to the browsing prospect than a cover-up.

I also can’t help wondering what his clients would think if they knew that their anonymity was blown as a result of the spammy techniques that Steven White was using on their behalf? The evil side of me was tempted to contact them and ask.

My approach is completely different. I show clients how to ‘own’ the story about them and regain balance so that the person searching can make up their mind about them. My way is credible, empowering and turns bad news into a real opportunity to be seen to learn and put things right – in the same public arena where those things went wrong.

If you’ve got a reputation problem and an ‘expert’ tells you he’s going to push the bad news off the top of Google, then you’re already heading down the wrong road and I can promise you that nothing good will come out of it except that you’ll spend a fortune making yourself look even guiltier and less trustworthy than when you started out.

Think about it. Seriously.

No No Reviews – hairy stories from Google

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.

Why can’t I stop people adding me to Facebook groups?

Facebook groups let you add friends without their permission – and there’s nothing they can do about it

…except leave Facebook.

I just discovered this tonight by adding my brother to a ‘Stop Paypal freezing peoples’ accounts’ group that I joined. I fully expected Facebook to send him some kind of invitation, but no, it just added him without his permission.

No doubt my brother will see that he has become a member of this group and use the ‘leave group’ option if he doesn’t want to be part of it. But if he was one of those people who doesn’t log in every day, he could be a member of a group without knowing it for days, weeks or even months.

From a reputation standpoint, that might not be such a good thing.

Reputation online: it’s how you behave that counts

All it takes is one careless reaction or outburst to ruin your reputation online

When it comes to online reputation, the single hardest thing for some people to understand is that everything you do online leaves a trace – and that people make up their minds about you and your business from the sum total of what they can find out about you.

As we all know, that sum total includes everything you say about yourself (your website, ads, press-releases and forum posts) and everything that everyone else says (blog comments, reviews, Tweets, Facebook comments) and so on.

Judging by the reputation management services you find online, many people think that preserving a good reputation is all about pushing bad reviews and unhappy (or malicious) customer comments of the first, critical, page of Google and replacing it with glowing comments that talk about how great they are.

This is borne out by the fact that most enquires I get about reputation problems are from people looking for a quick fix. These are the people who will end up paying a technical-sounding company to create a load of content to drown out the bad news in Google.  I don’t work with them for two simple reasons: firstly because you can’t guarantee driving stuff off the front page of Google and secondly (and more importantly) that efforts to do so always say more about you than the negative comments ever could.

Everybody makes mistakes. Most people forgive a business making a mistake and honestly owning up to it and looking to work with the customer to put it right. However, all my experience in online reputation and customer services shows that the one thing that customers won’t forget – that will drive them to actively look for ways to punish you – is not listening to them when things go wrong.

Trying to hire an offshore agency to ‘bury the bad news’ for you is a sure-fire way to communicate to customers that you’re the kind of person who will try to cover up your mistakes rather than face them.

In my experience, the smart move is to be genuinely transparent – and to do everything possible to convert the problem (there almost always IS something that you’ve had a hand in doing wrong) into a victory for you to demonstrate publicly how good you are at putting things right. Remember, your customer wants resolution and for you and him/her to be happy far more than they want to be in conflict with you. The smart way to preserve and build on your online reputation is to keep this fact in mind at all times – and to use it to your advantage.

Goodgaragescheme.co.uk: how do you respond to this?

Is Goodgaragescheme a dishonest way of shifting car treatments masquerading as ‘honest’ feedback?

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.