The dangers of escalation.After lunch Friday, Jeff started our weekly demo session with a vivid illustration of the danger of engaging with online trolls. Unfortunately I can’t get into details because I don’t want to get the feud going again.
Here’s the short version. There’s a certain company that claims to be in the reputation management business. They send out spam emails promising to make unflattering webpages disappear for $99 a month. This is, needless to say, total BS.
Unfortunately, we’re on their spamming list. Well, on Thursday morning, after Jeff received one of these emails, he made the unwise decision to reply, demanding, in impolite and undoubtedly profane terms, to be removed from the list.
That’s all. Just one intemperate email.
Only a few hours later, Allan received a Google alert indicating that said spammers had posted some exceedingly vile and libellous allegations about Jeff (and our company) on a consumer complaint website. For a brief time on Thursday, this webpage appeared on the second page of results when you Googled Jeff’s name.
(Note: I’ve altered this screenshot to conceal the identity of the spammer and the website where it was posted.)
Yup, that's libel.
At this point many people, after punching out a few windows, would’ve called a lawyer. However, recognizing that it would take months to get the website taken down via legal means, and that in the meantime these lies might be seen by hundreds of people, Jeff took a more pragmatic approach: he called the spammer and politely asked him to remove his post. Which was done shortly thereafter.
No real harm done, except to Jeff’s blood pressure. But it demonstrates how essential it is to keep track of what people are saying about you online, and (more depressingly) how important it is to keep your wits about you when dealing with trolls and scam artists. Escalation is futile against an enemy unconstrained by ethics.
Brendan King at DMS’10: Reputation Management for SMBs.A few VendAsta guys were down at the Directional Media Strategies conference in Dallas last week, and our CEO Brendan King took part in a panel discussion called Ins and Outs of Reputation Management. Below is a condensed version of what Brendan had to say.
Your reputation is what you say about yourself and what others say about you.
Reputation management is nothing new. Every business has been doing it for as long as business has existed.
What we’re really talking about here is how the Internet and social applications have changed the way reputations spread.
Did you ever see the movie Outbreak? Remember how they kept asking, “How contagious is the virus?” and, “Is the virus airborne?”
Reputation for SMBs today is airborne and contagious.
Reputation is local.
Online Reputation Management, or ORM, has been around for some time. It’s used by pretty much every big brand. Companies like Nike use tools like Radian6, Scoutlabs, and Alterian SM2.
These tools cost from $600 to $10,000 per month. And while they’re very effective at monitoring Nike’s brand overall, they do a poor job of monitoring the reputation of a Nike Store in Dallas.
You’ll notice a recurring theme in my presentation. For a small or medium business, reputation is local. A Starbucks franchise in Dallas doesn’t care about a Starbucks in LA, or even a Starbucks on the other side of town.
The local ORM space is still in a very early stage. In the headings below, I’ll discuss what I think is the basic set of functionality for local ORM for small and medium businesses.
Visibility, or Presence Management.
In other words, Where is my business listed? Where is my business NOT listed? How does my anchor data look?
Strictly speaking, presence management isn’t necessarily part of ORM. But we think it’s part of the package that needs to be delivered to SMBs.
Data on the Internet has inertia. Once it’s there, it tends to stay out there, even if it changes in the real world. Businesses might not even realize how often their information appears online, and how often that information is wrong.
Presence management has three components.
The first, obviously, is to make sure your business is visible in all the places people are searching for you.
The second is to make sure your anchor data – your business name, address, and phone number – is accurate.
If someone tries to call you and gets a wrong number, most of the time she won’t take the time to hunt down the right number. She’ll move on to one of your competitors.
The third component is consistency. This is less intuitive. Businesses don’t realize that even small variations in how their anchor data appears can have a negative impact on how prominently they turn up when people search for them.
For instance, Google considers these things to determine if a business is included in their new 7-pack. These are the listings that are highlighted in a box at the top of the page when someone searches for, say, “Milwaukee plumbers”.
Monitoring of structured data.
It’s essential to monitor reviews. Thankfully it’s pretty easy because review sites contain what we call structured data.
That is, every review is laid out in a certain way. It’s associated with a particular business. It’s ranked or rated using a common standard.
Here’s a screenshot from our product, StepRep. These are the results for one of our customers.
This is a dentist’s office, by the way. Just reading the reviews made my teeth hurt. (I’ve blurred out the name.)
Because the reviews are all rated on a scale of zero-to-five stars, it’s easy to tell which are bad and which are good, and to calculate an average rating, as you can see on the right.
But SMBs need to know about more than just the reviews. In fact they can find the reviews themselves.
Monitoring of unstructured data.
Unstructured data sources are more difficult to monitor. But they’re quickly becoming the most important.
This is the stuff that small businesses are unlikely to find on their own. This would include content from blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and all the “hyperlocal” sites that people tend to forget about, sites with names like saskatoon.com or dallasweb.com.
Because SMBs are time-starved, because they want to see the most important information first, the monitoring needs to be automatically filtered by sentiment so the most positive and negative comments can be separated from the rest.
This is harder than monitoring review sites, because the data isn’t laid out in any particular way. Nowhere on the page does it say “five stars out of five”, or “zero out of five”. You need to build an algorithmic engine to interpret the sentiment of these pages.
Comparisons to local competition.
Reputation management should allow busineses to easily keep track of how they stack up against their competitors.
For instance, our Share of Voice graph counts all the online mentions for the category of dentists in Latham, NY. In that data set, how often was this particular dentist mentioned, compared to his competitors?
You’ll notice that we also separate the data for recent results and all-time results, so the dentist can judge if he’s losing or gaining ground.
Local trending.
Local trending is useful for discovering latent marketing messages.
For instance, the keywords graphic for Kells Irish Pub in Portland showed a huge spike in mentions of the World Cup. It turned out the local soccer community had identified this pub as the best place to watch the games.
The ultimate goal is to deliver information businesses can use in their real offline operations.
Trending keywords can give businesses valuable hints on what to focus on in their promotional efforts. Or it might tell them where they can improve their customer service. For instance, if you see a lot of tweets from customers complaining about your disgusting bathrooms…
Clean your bathrooms!
Nobody wants to do anything.
Oh yeah, and this important. Everything that I’ve showed you…has to work without anybody doing anything.
Reputation management needs to perform well with a minimal set of accurate anchor data.
Because the SMB doesn’t want to learn how to operate a whole new piece of software.
Neither does the salesperson.
People hate to learn new stuff. So until they get hooked, you need to make it all automatic. Alerts of new reviews, negative mentions, comparisons to the competition – they all just have to come automagically to the customer.
How to sell ORM.
The people most qualified to sell reputation management are directory publishers like the people in this room.
You’ve got the salesforce. You’ve got the trusted brand name. And ORM is a natural fit with your services.
The way to sell ORM is in a bundle with other features. It needs to be completely done within your brand.
Consider the benefits.
ORM has a high perceived value for SMB customers. But the unit price is low. It’s a good feature to entice customers into a higher-priced bundle.
It’s a useful tool for keeping in touch with customers you might otherwise communicate with only once a year, when it’s time to renew the ad.
Make your customers love you.
ORM delivers very relevant results that businesses will come to anticipate and love.
Let me give you an example. A business owner in Vancouver, an early StepRep subscriber. She runs a women’s clothing store.
She told us how, when she first started getting the New Results emails from StepRep, she found them annoying. She never really looked at them, just booted them to the spam folder.
One day she opens one of the emails. She discovers that a line of clothing that she has the exclusive rights to distribute in Vancouver is being offered by another retailer in the city.
She calls the manufacturer and calls them some dirty names and regains her exclusivity.
Now she tells us she can’t wait for those emails to come. It’s the first thing she reads in the morning.
She loves us now.
Brendan King on the future of local search.Brendan, Jeff, and Ches are on a plane right now, headed to the Directional Media Strategies conference in Dallas, where tomorrow Brendan’s going to be participating in a panel discussion on reputation management.
DMS is BIA/Kelsey’s big annual conference that covers “the future of the local search and Yellow Pages industry”. (I’m quoting their press release.) Brendan and Jeff have been talking about this conference for weeks. We’re awfully interested in the future of local search because, frankly, we think our technologies are going to be a big part of that future.
Brendan wrote a long post last year about how the Internet was revolutionizing the YP industry, and how YP publishers were adapting by incorporating pay-for-performance, user-generated content, and social context into their online products. Our business plan has evolved a lot since then, but his analysis still stands. It’s an interesting read. Still gets more traffic than any post I’ve ever written for this blog.
Brendan’s all about the big ideas. On Friday he gave us a preview of what he’ll be talking about as part of the reputation management panel. He’ll probably struggle to keep under his time limit – he’s got a lot to talk about. If you’re attending DMS, you should check it out. It runs from 3:45 to 4:30 on Tuesday, Sept 13.
The little things matter.We’re always making improvements to StepRep. Sometimes they’re obvious, like when we alter colours or the page design. Other times they’re invisible to users – little tweaks to the code that make the pages load more efficiently, with the changes measured in milliseconds.
Today I’d like to talk about a change in the actual functionality of the software. You may have noticed it already on your Visibility tab. Here are some listings for my favourite Oregon bookstore, Salem’s Book Bin:
The function of the Visibility tab is to show you where your business listing appears so you can correct it if it’s wrong. Up until last week that meant clicking through to the listing to verify its accuracy yourself. As you can see from the screenshot above, now we’re taking some of the work off your shoulders. Wherever there’s a discrepancy with the contact info you’ve entered into StepRep, we’ll highlight the difference in red. This is handy because it’s so easy to overlook a swapped digit in a phone number, or an address that says “Avenue” instead of “Street”.
Note the message that reads, “Attention: Possible error in contact info.” We spent some time debating the wording of this message, because often the discrepancy won’t be an error per se. Here StepRep has identified a business listing where the name is displayed slightly differently – as “The Book Bin”, rather than “Book Bin”.
Red flags might also be raised over minuscule variations in how the address appears – “450 Court Street” versus “450 Court St“. We’re going to be improving the algorithm over the next few weeks so StepRep knows not to highlight irrelevant differences in punctuation or abbreviation. But we have to be careful, because we don’t want users to overlook variations that might confuse their customers. It’s probably best to err on the side of highlighting all the differences.
Rounding up recent blog activity.It’s funny how quickly a blog can get “stale”. It seems like only a couple days ago I last updated this blog, but no, it’s been almost three weeks.
But there’s been action in other corners of the vendastaverse. Last month on the Spokesmonster blog I shared some of our ideas for renovating the StepRep homepage. Then earlier today I told the story of a bizarre search result that turned up in my StepRep account.
Meanwhile on the company blog I’ve been releasing my notes from our weekly demos. Every Friday the whole company gathers in the boardroom and we show off what we’ve accomplished that week. Naturally in the last month there have been some fixes and improvements to StepRep:
Next, Brendan demonstrated how a persistent bug has finally been hunted down and squashed. For months we’ve been aware that StepRep would take an embarrassingly long time to load when you accessed it with Internet Explorer. Last week Dave managed to isolate the snippet of JavaScript that was giving IE the vapours and replace it with some Microsoft-friendlier code. As Brendan clicked briskly around the site in IE, it was obvious that Dave’s fix had been successful.
So if it seems a little lonely over here, it’s only because the party has moved to an adjacent room. Load up your plate with cocktail weenies and join us in the kitchen.
The Great Dog Food Experiment.
On a recent road trip up the west coast I broke down in Salem, Oregon, and spent a few hours, while the van was being repaired, browsing an excellent used bookstore called the Book Bin.
I remembered my visit several months later when Brendan initiated the Great Dog Food Experiment.
The name of the experiment comes from the expression “eating your own dog food” – which means that a company should use the products it makes. (According to Wikipedia, the phrase may have been inspired by “the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders’ meetings”.)
There are two reasons for this practice. One is that a company should stand behind its product – if you aren’t excited about using it yourself, you shouldn’t expect other people to pay for it. The other reason is that you learn a lot by interacting with a product in the same way that regular users do. If there’s something wrong with the way a dropdown menu works, it might not be apparent through testing, but it will come out through routine daily use.
Of course, StepRep is designed for small and medium businesses, and most of the people who work here at VendAsta don’t actually run their own businesses. It would be redundant if each one of us created a separate account to monitor VendAsta’s reputation. So a while back Brendan proposed that everyone “adopt” a company somewhere in North America, and use StepRep to monitor its reputation, just as if we worked there.
Among the adoptees are a restaurant in Vancouver, a resort in Florida, a bar in New Orleans, a realtor in Phoenix, and lots of small businesses scattered around our hometown of Saskatoon.
I adopted the Book Bin. Using basic information available online – phone number, address, competitors – I created an account for the store, and I’ve been monitoring its reputation ever since. Here’s a screenshot showing the Book Bin’s recent Share of Voice, measured against several competing used bookstores in Salem:
If you zoom in you can see that the Book Bin is doing quite well, edging out its main competitor, Escape Fiction, in the frequency that it’s mentioned online.
The insights gleaned in our Great Dog Food Experiment have informed the changes, still ongoing, that we’ve been making to StepRep’s user interface over the last few weeks. If you click over there and log in, you can see what I’m talking about.
Better, right? We’re curious to hear what our regular users think of the changes.
PS. I’ve also been keeping track of some of the work we’re doing on StepRep in recent updates to the VendAsta blog.
Reputation management for your small business.We recently created this little one-page comic to help our partners explain reputation management to their small business customers.
Writing good (and bad) marketing copy.So Brendan, our CEO, is down in Charlotte, North Carolina. Over the next few days he’ll be meeting with our friends and new partners at UBL. We’ll let you know if anything interesting comes out of that meeting.
On the plane he was reading the latest issue of Inc. Magazine, and he came across this article by Jason Fried called Why Is Business Writing So Awful?
When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you’re saying, “Our products are like everyone else’s, too.” Or think of it this way: Would you go to a dinner party and just repeat what the person to the right of you is saying all night long? Would that be interesting to anybody? So why are so many businesses saying the same things at the biggest party on the planet – the marketplace?
I can tell you why so many writers clutter up websites with boring, jargon-filled, imitative marketing clichés. It’s because they don’t really know what their companies do. I know from experience that there’s nothing harder than trying to write a marketing message when you don’t really know what you’re marketing. You need to be able to answer the questions:
What are we selling?
Why buy it from us rather than them?
If you can’t answer these questions clearly to yourself, you’re not going to be able to put the answers into words for your readers. Then you can forget about making your writing lively or interesting; you’ll be lucky to string together two coherent sentences.
Luckily you can always spread buzzwords and clichés over your bad writing like mortar over faulty brickwork. It helps cover the gaps where you’re not really sure what you’re trying to say. Very likely the page will be so boring that no-one will ever read it and realize how little sense it makes.
I don’t offer these observations from a position of superiority. I’ve done this kind of bad writing myself, consciously as well as unconsciously. I’m sure you can find examples all over the StepRep site. The only defense I can offer is that writing well is difficult, while writing badly is…not exactly easy, but easier.
In the same email where he drew my attention to the article by Jason Fried, Brendan made an attempt to clearly define what separates StepRep from its competitors in the reputation management biz. Here’s what he came up with. I think it’s good enough to share unedited:
- We might not be the best yet, but we will be.
- We will relentlessly improve our product.
- We will listen, learn, and make changes to StepRep, just as StepRep will help you do for your business.
- We are a development company, not a sales and marketing company.
- We care more about real value and performance than flashy stuff.
- We like to have fun, but we like to win. We will never stop until we win.
The partnership plan.We’ve been doing a lousy job keeping up this blog. And it’s not because we have nothing to report.
Over on the corporate blog there’s a press release announcing StepRep’s new partnership with UniversalBusinessListing.org. This was the culmination of several months of relationship-building with UBL, and the first of what we expect will soon be many partnerships with companies that offer marketing services to small and medium businesses.
We’ve changed directions over the last six months. As you may recall, last year we spent a lot of time building and promoting an application called MyFrontSteps that was meant to help homeowners connect with home service providers.
MyFrontSteps and StepRep were conceived as two halves of a whole, a socially-intelligent matrix where service providers could connect to new customers, and homeowners could seek out reliable service providers, through a network of mutual recommendations.
It was pretty audacious, and it never really took off. We learned a lot from the experiment, and we built some incredible technology that we’ve since licensed to another company. But MyFrontSteps itself we’ve basically abandoned. (You can still head over to MyFrontSteps.com, log in with your Facebook or Google account, and have a look around.)
Here’s what we learned.
- Lesson 1. People have spent a lot of time building their social networks on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They don’t want to put in a whole bunch of effort to duplicate a network that they’ve already built.
This insight inspired us to develop MashedIn, a platform that tunnels through the barriers between social networks to reveal previously hidden connections.
- Lesson 2. The reputation management components of StepRep are extremely popular with small and medium-sized businesses. These reputation management tools, which we initially developed as gravy for our larger plan of connecting businesses and their customers, quickly turned into our core technology.
So we’ve concentrated on bulking up StepRep as a reputation intelligence tool. And lately we’ve made that technology available to partners of all kinds. Online directories, SEO companies, Certified Marketing Representatives, domain hosting companies – anyone who offers marketing-related services to small and medium businesses – can bundle our reputation intelligence tools with their existing services, or add them as an upgrade.
Meanwhile, anyone who’s interested in monitoring their online reputation can continue to sign up over at StepRep.com.
Huh. This blog post doesn’t begin to catch up on all the stuff we’ve been up to over the last few months. We’ll try and do better.
Some sweet surprises, courtesy of StepRep.This blog tends to focus on all the changes and improvements we’re making to StepRep. We’re constantly trying out new features, testing and refining them – and occasionally throwing them out altogether.
But maybe we don’t spend enough time talking about the core of StepRep, the stuff that doesn’t change much from day to day because it’s already working pretty well.
Yesterday over on the Spokesmonster blog I described how StepRep was helping me keep on top of my sideline as a music video auteur. That tale involved a detour into the fringes of Zach Galifianakis’ facial hair, where all sorts of fun was found.
Today I am alerted to a flattering post on the wonderful Cat’s Eye Marketing Blog. Judy Dunn, who operates Cat’s Eye Marketing down in the Seattle area, relates the story of how she got a friend of hers hooked on StepRep. Lo and behold:
Five days later he called me out of the blue. I could feel his smile over the phone line.
“I just wanted to thank you, ” he said.
“For what?” I said.
“For leaving that comment about StepRep on my blog.”
Okay, now I was puzzled. It was a great tool, but a phone call?
Turns out my friend went in and registered, did a search for “social media” and “media buyer.” Up came a company looking for someone with those exact skills. He called, interviewed and three days later, he had a new job.
Heartwarming! Judy goes on to say:
I think sometimes we forget about the power of social media. We’re there. We’re talking. It’s fun. We don’t always know if people are listening.
Or when they will have something to say.
If it is your blog, or twitter, or Facebook, I would say, just keep putting your stuff out there. Yeah, it’s work and sometimes we get discouraged. And it can seem random and pointless at times.
But things can happen in an instant.
Things that will change your life.
Judy’s post is one of those little serendipitous surprises that helps to make all the hard work seem worthwhile. I hope her friend finds fulfilment at his new job, and I hope we’ll continue to hear from other folks who are using StepRep to build their businesses or get ahead in their careers.
Thanks for helping to spread the word, Judy!
