Google Search Results Encourage New Wave Of Negative Customer Service
A fascinating article in today’s New York Times examines the case of DecorMyEyes, an online eyeglasses retailer who’s found an interesting exploit in Google’s search rankings.
Noting that Google’s PageRank algorithm doesn’t determine if a linkback to a Web site is positive or negative, store owner Vitoly Borker games that system simply: He fights every customer complaint bitterly, with verbal abuse, counter-complaints, and what some construe as overt threats of violence.
(Update, Dec. 2, 2010: Google has changed its PageRank algorithm to weigh the negativity of comments.)
This aggressive, seemingly destructive behavior is so over-the-top, it leads disgruntled customers to complain everyplace they can online, including at such massive entities as Get Satisfaction.
The long and short: Lots of mentions and links to his Web site, plus lots of mentions of the brands he sells, all in context, often on high-traffic Web sites, means searching for a specific pair of eyeglasses often leads to Borker’s Web site being listed first in a Google search.
Borker effectively preys on the inexperienced online shopper. “If you’re the type of person who reads consumer reviews,” says the Times, “Mr. Borker would rather you shop elsewhere.”
He gets away with it via a combination of apathy and obeying the letter of the law.
His previous hosting company and eBay (from where he buys glasses for resale) ignored scores of complaints until the Times inquired about his accounts. The confusion law enforcement has over Web-based commerce crime, including the IC3, means police have largely been absent, even in the face of obvious violations of the law.
Borker carefully monitors Visa and MasterCard complaints, making sure he doesn’t go past the monthly complaint limits. After MasterCard closed one of his merchant accounts, he opened another:
“There is no such thing as shutting someone down on the Internet,” he said during our initial telephone interview. “It isn’t possible. If Visa and MasterCard ever shut me down, I’d use the name of a friend of mine. Give him 1 percent.”
Most interesting, Borker sells on Amazon.com’s Marketplace, and doesn’t employ any nastiness there, because Amazon has a very low tolerance for customer complaints, according to the Times.
Continue reading: Google Search Results Encourage New Wave Of Negative Customer Service »
How Jim Rome Uses Social Media To Control The Worst Of His Audience
One of sports talk radio host Jim Rome’s catchphrases is “more of me, less of you,” meaning that the people who call and e-mail his show tend to offer opinions that don’t improve the conversation.
Today’s show-teaser post on his Facebook page illustrates the problem perfectly:
Setting aside for a moment that “first” posts are, by definition, trolls, one has to wonder about the mindset behind posting “sixth,” especially when he winds up eighth. As tends to be the case, a few very bad trolls overwhelm this open (by which I mean “not moderated in advance”) conversation.
But Rome’s Facebook page is there for the express purpose of sating trolls and low-quality comments. It’s not meant to advance the issues at hand; it’s specifically meant to siphon away from his premium product — radio airtime — problem comments, keeping that premium product clear for high-quality content.
In leveraging Facebook as troll control, Rome has found an interesting social media strategy — one that won’t work for everyone, but can serve as a model to other information media providers.
Continue reading: How Jim Rome Uses Social Media To Control The Worst Of His Audience »
Comment Spammed By A Big Boy, And I Don't Like It
No matter how it's presented, it's still spam. via ideas.veer.com
I received a comment today from a popular .NET blog (name redacted to protect the guilty), in response to yesterday’s post about scripting a backup of a remote SQL Server instance.
I’d be flattered if I didn’t know that it was almost certainly the a result of a Google alert.
The comment was, in short, a link to a post on that blog, which was itself little more than a link to another blog. The article on that third blog describes how to script a backup of a local SQL Server database.
The comment wasn’t really germane — my post is about remote backups; the techniques cited in the linked article wouldn’t work for a remote server — but it did deal with SQL Server backups. I figured it might therefore help someone who stumbled across my blog post, but who actually wanted a local backup solution.
So I initially approved the comment. And, in turn, I visited that link, to see if it directly links to my article.
See, that’s how linkbacks are supposed to work: I write content. He links to it in his post. A link to his blog appears on my blog as a result. As in, each of our articles link to the other.
We reinforce each other’s content. It’s a two-way street.
Unfortunately, the popular blog’s post did not link back to my post. In fact, the popular blog appears to have comments disabled entirely.
So what I had was a well-indexed site, which probably saw my post get indexed through some keywords it wants to target, and which in turn decided to dump a comment on my site in an effort to promote its search engine ranking. And did so without linking back to me, which would have helped my rankings.
If that isn’t the definition of comment spam, I don’t know what is. And it bothers me immensely that a site which is generally well-regarded in the developer community would do such a thing. Admittedly, I profit more from a mutual link exchange with a more popular blog; but I don’t profit at all by approving barely pertinent links as comments.
So, I deleted the popular blog’s comment. It will be welcome here when it allows comments and linkbacks on its site.
All links in this post on delicious: http://www.delicious.com/dougvdotcom/comment-spammed-by-a-big-boy-and-i-dont-like-it
A Completely Awesome 2600 Cover
Check out the cover on the Summer 2010 edition of 2600, The Hacker Quarterly:
Cover, Summer 2010 issue, 2600 magazine
I saw it at my local Barnes & Noble bookstore and had to buy it for its complete awesomeness. The one thing 2600 has, every issue, is cool cover art.
I don’t know the exact system to which these tape cartridges belong, but I remember seeing very similar ones back in the late 1980s at the University of Maine’s computer lab.
The labels are what make this cover so great:
- The coordinates on the top cartridge’s white label mark the epicenter of the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The “KH-5″ label on the side refers, I assume, to a series of early 1960s mapping / spy satellites. There may be a more significant connection between the two labels that I don’t get.
- I like the implicit message in the third tape’s label, that the Library of Congress is retaining tweets.
- I love the fifth tape’s label: If only such a tape existed, it would eliminate quite a bit of annoying political sideshow. Then again, no; it probably wouldn’t.
- The tapes from the seventh down are also quite amusing.
And taken in context with the “DESTROY” label on the box in the background, and the placement of the entire stack atop tabloid personals ads, really adds to the entire presentation.
New England GiveCamp 2010: What A Great Experience
The first New England GiveCamp was this weekend at Microsoft’s Northeast Research and Development building in Cambridge, MA, and it was, by far, one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in the 15 years I have been professionally coding.
About 100 technical and non-technical volunteers spent the weekend of June 11-13 writing code for charities. Most projects were Web site upgrades — either installing a content management system, or extending that system to do something it didn’t do before, such as collecting very specific data, integrating with a customer relationship management tool, etc.
Other projects were more complex. For example, my project was data normalization and version control.
I was assigned to the Goshen Land Trust, a charity that protects open and green space in Goshen, CT. My team members were Kriss Aho and Pat Tormey, both from the Boston area; and Chris Craig, the president of GLT.
Prior to last weekend, GLT tracked all its customer relationships in Excel spreadsheets. They do their accounting in Quickbooks.
If someone was a volunteer, his name went into the volunteer spreadsheet. If he owned land, his name was in the landowner spreadsheet. If he was a land or money donor, his name went into another spreadsheet. And so on, and so on; this story has been told a thousand times before, we all know it by heart.
And, of course, there were several versions of each of these spreadsheets out there: They were exchanged back and forth via e-mail, meaning no two copies of the same spreadsheet were alike. Again, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Finally, donor payments are managed entirely separate from the spreadsheets, via entries into Quickbooks. So there’s a completely different store of around 800 mostly duplicate names in Quickbooks, too, which isn’t easily compared to a spreadsheet of about 2,000 names.
So we had to figure out a way to impose some version control on these sheets; we had to create a master data store, so we could have an authoritative source of customer relationship information; and we had to sync customer information in Quickbooks to match the master data store.
Sounds like fun, I know. It actually was, after it stopped being awful.
Continue reading: New England GiveCamp 2010: What A Great Experience »
