Archive for July, 2008
eriksr on July 30th, 2008
I have a secret. My secret is that I love to read about companies making asses of themselves. Not because I suffer from a severe case of schadenfreude, but because there’s just so darn much you can learn from these situations.
And, yeah, they sometimes make me laugh.
Case in point: One of my favorite blogs, Consumerist (a veritable font of best practices or case studies for anyone dealing with consumers), recently wrote about how Eforcity Eforcity bribed a customer to remove a negative Amazon.com review she had given one of their products with a refund.
A copy of their letter is below. But stay with me here.
Your first lesson today, class . . .
First off, credit goes to Eforcity for being proactive about the things people are saying about it online. Way to go! If every business was this proactive we might have a veritable consumer utopia on our hands! So I award you 4 million points.
But wait. I am now about to penalize you those 4 million points, plus 12 million more for being such an, well, I don’t want to use the “ass” word.
So let’s say donkey.
The value of feedback
Customer feedback is an open and honest dialogue between a customer and a company and one customer and other customers.
The key here is “open and honest.”
But if that feedback is manipulated by the company, then you lose the “open and honest” part. And not only does it make the feedback pointless (which is why Eforcity loses 4 million points), but even worse (and this is why Eforcity loses an addition 12 million points) it makes the company look like a manipulative bully.
Which creates a helluva PR nightmare, doesn’t it?
And, straight from The Consumerist, here is a copy of the letter the customer says Eforcity sent to her.
The letter:
Dear Sarah X XXXXXXXX
RE: Amazon order #XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX
Invoice #XXXXXXX
Item title: SAM M300… Car Charger
Thank you for your recent purchase with Eforcity on Amazon.com.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. We would like to offer you a refund, if the negative feedback is removed.
Please reply to this email directly and let us know. As soon as the feedback is removed, we will go ahead and process a refund.
Please follow the below instructions to remove feedback on Amazon:
1. Go to http://www.amazon.com/your-account.
2. Find the pull-down menu next to View by Order. Select ORDERS PLACED IN THE LAST 6 MONTHS, and hit the GO button.
3. After you sign in, you’ll find a listing of your recent orders. Select the relevant order and click the VIEW ORDER button.
4. You will find a feedback section 2/3rds of the way down the page. To remove feedback, click on the REMOVE link in the feedback section of the order summary.
5. You may only remove feedback if it is 60 days or less since you left the feedback.
We appreciate your business, and again would like to extend our sincere apology. Please feel free to let us know how we may further assist you with your order.
Sincerely,
Salina
Customer Service Team
And here is the “you’re killing me part”
As if the request to remove the negative feedback were not bad enough, the very specific instructions on how to do so are just side-splitting.
(And bearing in mind that these sorts of things tend to be form letters, it does make you wonder how often Eforcity sent this out, doesn’t it?)
eriksr on July 28th, 2008
Dear Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb,
Thank you so much for your article about bit.ly. If I ever meet you in person I’m going to give you cookies and maybe flowers.
And you might want to do the same. Let me explain.
What is Bit.ly?
Bit.ly is a URL shortener similar to TinyURL. Unlike TinyURL however, bit.ly gives you access to metrics.
Why should I care?
Let me answer this with a common scenario.
Let’s say your client or company is about to launch a new site, or has created a new sub-page, and you want to let people know about it.
A shortened URL is a lot easier for people to read and understand.
Now let’s say you want to make this URL a link. And you want to track how many people click your link.
Traditionally you would use a unique referral ID appended to a link. So you end up with something like this:
- http://mydomain.com/tracking.php?ref=abc&destination=1
- http://mydomain.com/tracking.php?ref=abc&destination=2
Looks simple enough, doesn’t it? But in my experience, co-ordinating with your client’s (or own) IT/webmasters to get a referral ID process set up is painful and time-consuming.
And that’s where Bit.ly really shines. Because, with Bit.ly, you can track how many people click your link without involving IT.
Bit.ly has a long memory
The first time you use Bit.ly for a pitch, you do so to shorten your URL. The second time you use it — after the pitch has been sent — you simply enter that shortened URL to see how many people have clicked your link.
Easy, eh?
But, even better, bit.ly remembers the last 15 times you used the service. So if you are putting together a report for a release that went out last month, say, and you want to know the number of clicks your link generated, all you have to do is surf over to Bit.ly.
Of course (and life just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?) you can forego the surfing and access this information via an RSS feed.
So where can I use Bit.ly?
Of course, since you’re using Bit.ly’s shortened URL and not the actual URL, you wouldn’t want to use this in a press release, for example (just think of the library of dead links you would have if Bit.ly were to fail). So save it for items with a short life span. Like a pitch. Or an email campaign. And any short effort where you want to know how many people are clicking your link(s).
Pitfall: Privacy and cookie cleaning
But great as Bit.ly is, there are two pitfalls.
First, the metrics about your shortened URL are not private. Anyone can replace the unique part of the info screen URL (the bolded part — http://bit.ly/info.php?id=ikWtm) with a code from someone else to see their click-through rates. So be aware of this if you don’t want to share metrics (or if you want to see someone else’s).
Second, if you don’t accept cookies, or if you clear your cache, then you won’t get historical information from bit.ly. Be aware of that if you are relying on them to generate client reports complete with click through metrics.
eriksr on July 24th, 2008
One of my personal crusades is to help grease the wheels between marketers and bloggers. It’s no secret that the relationship between the two is frequently strained with PR practitioners not truly understanding bloggers and with bloggers routinely receiving press releases or pitches that have little or nothing to do with what they write about.
And that’s where a new service, Blogio, fits, or tries to fit, in.
Blogio describes itself as “…a pipeline between top marketers and top Bloggers.” Here’s some more on their philosophy:
Blogio was born from a need to adapt an “old world” media (Public Relations) to a new media phenomenon (Bloggers). We believe that the continued fragmentation and diversity of the internet is great, but lacks an economic engine that is non-advertising based. Blogio provides a new financial model that allows marketers access to bloggers while supporting the blogging movement in general. Blogio seeks to offer compensation for a Blogger to read and review the information offered.”
Blogio uses a revenue share model — marketers pay $300 to distribute information on Blogio, and that revenue is shared with targets 50/50. The top ten bloggers in a niche end up with $15 each. Marketers can even use a service called “BlogExclusive” where Blogio keeps $150 and the target blogger gets $150. Marketers are paying for access to bloggers, who are under no obligation to write about anything.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? I’m going to register and take it for a spin and get back to you with a more in-depth report later. (But, in the meantime, if any of you have tried the service, do comment and let us know how it worked out.)
eriksr on July 22nd, 2008
Purely at random I found myself at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business (henceforth referred to as Haas) site and, browsing about, came across something truly delightful amidst their faculty pages — iPhone wallpaper!.
I’m flabbergasted. Someone even provided a link to a .pdf of the user guide. Bravo to Haas for being relatively progressive!
eriksr on July 21st, 2008
Hot on the heels of my rant about Technorati…okay, not on the heels at all, but let’s pretend, yeah? Comes word from Kristen Nicole at Mashable that Blogged.com has added blog article search to its repertoire.
This excited me. I recently gave up on using Technorati to identify influential bloggers and thought, yay, a potential replacement. Alas, it’s not meant to be. Read the rest of this entry »
eriksr on July 16th, 2008
Note to RSS readers: There’s a web-based widget on this page you may only be able to see on the Web site.
I’m in love. Erik and Sprout, sitting in a tree, C-U-S-T-O-M-I-Z-I-N-G.
For years I’ve desperately wanted to make my own widgets but, truth be told, I’ve never quite had it in me to learn things like XML and JavaScript. That’s changing these days since I’m on something of a personal education kick, but Sprout has given me a good reason not to bother. See, Sprout is a Web service that lets you build a Web-based widget using a drag and drop interface. You can incorporate pictures, video, music, RSS feeds — tons of great stuff.
You can see my own personal work of art after the jump — and yes, I couldn’t resist adding music, so lower the volume on your speakers!
Read the rest of this entry »
