02 October 2006

Scaring Up Business the Web 2.0 Way

Halloween isn't even here yet but one Web 2.0 company was out last week trying the scare the pants off local business owners, including florists. In an effort to drive traffic to their 'New Yellow Pages', merchantcircle.com used automated dial-up calls to tell companies across the US they'd received negative reviews on their site.

I first heard about the calls on a forum for florists, flowerchat.com, when six different flower shop owners posted about receiving 'negative review' calls from merchantcircle.com. For local businesses, like neighborhood florists, our reputations mean everything. Our businesses are extensions of ourselves so being warned of poor ratings on a public site was cause for serious concern.

Posts by very unhappy merchants, deservedly describing merchantcircle.com's calls with words like 'unethical', 'scam' and 'borderline extortion' began appearing under older blog entries by John Battelle and Peter Krasilovsky since the two were among top search results for 'merchantcircle' and 'merchant circle' respectively. Battelle took note and invited merchantcircle.com CEO Ben Smith to comment ....errrr...spin.

Krasilovsky, on the other hand, claimed the new comments were 'fake complaints' and deleted all of them (and there were at least 15 or so). For the record, I'm the 'Cathy' quoted as being one of the 'rats' in his September 27 post and I did include both my email address and website link. I received no email request for verification. The Kelsey Group consultant should have done a little homework before jumping to conspiracy theories and Mr. Smith should apologize to not only Krasilovsky but every merchant plagued with these auto-dialer calls.

One of the florists did 'claim' her listing on merchantcircle.com and reported that her rating improved just by logging in. So it looks like merchants have two ways to 'preserve' the reputations of their businesses; claim it or request it be deleted. Some choice.

Local merchants do need help getting found on the web. Many are very late to the party. Local flower shops have been getting far out-paced in Search by national marketers (like FTD, 1-800flowers, Teleflora and their non-florist affiliates) for years. Most florists would rather pay for effective local advertising than cough up commissions and fees as high as 35% to the national brokers - but those same national companies and their faux 'local florist call centers' currently hold top placement in 'local' resources like yellowpages.com and superpages.com. (Yellowpages.com lists at least one of these call centers as being 'located in' thousands of zip codes across America.)

No doubt, merchantcircle.com got a huge spike in traffic after these 'negative review' calls. That they expected any merchant to recommend their site to other local vendors or to purchase services from a company that introduced itself through such an untrustworthy marketing ploy shows a deep misunderstanding of the nature of small businesses.

Web 2.0 is supposed to be about empowering, not exploiting. Looks like this brand of Merchant Circle viral marketing is in need of a serious inoculation - perhaps at the state or federal level.
Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!
Filed under:
 

Comment Notification

If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here

Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS

Comments

# MerchantCircle said:

Hi Cathy -

We agree with you that there is an opportunity for local florists to catch up with some of the larger flower chains who are using the web in a big way and finding a lot of clients. We would like to open up a dialogue on how MerchantCircle might be able to help but first wanted to reply to your post with some details on what we've been doing to try and improve the situation. It’s our goal to help local merchants attract customers easily and effectively on the web. The last thing we would want is to cause any confusion for business owners. We take that very personally.

We sincerely apologize and are completely dedicated to addressing any and all of the problems that have arisen. Please hear us out as we explain. Our intent was to try and figure out the best way to communicate to merchants that new information had been posted on their listing page (which was a common request of many merchants), and to do it in a way that worked across a large number of merchants.

Unfortunately, the way we communicated created some challenges, which we are addressing in 3 ways.

1) There appears to be a large amount of confusion over “review versus rating” – many merchants did not understand the difference between ratings (quantitative scores – i.e. 1-5 stars) and reviews (qualitative comments – “Good service, great food”). To help address this, effective last week we began changing “review” to “testimonial” on the MerchantCircle site – we hope this removes some of the confusion. Going forward we are looking at further site changes to make the site easier to use and understand.

2) MerchantCircle has responded to every email with a detailed FAQ and a personal response for anyone whose question was not addressed by the FAQ. If anyone still has questions, they can email support@merchantcircle.com – we are currently responding to all in-bound emails within 1 business day. Anyone who wants to have their listing page removed can email remove@merchantcircle.com and include their business name, city, and state and it will be removed within 2 business days.

3) In response to merchant emails, the contact campaign in its current form has been ended. We still want to be able to notify merchants about changes to their page and are evaluating other ways to communicate this information.

4) We received a number of other great suggestions from merchants that we hope to release over the next several weeks. For example, we can do more to prevent inadvertent ratings by site visitors. If anyone has further suggestions, please email support@merchantcircle.com

Too often, local business owners don’t have the resources to create a presence on the web. We’ve done it for them for free. The best part is there’s no catch for the services MerchantCircle offers. We provide a web page for each merchant that is optimized for search engines (like Google and Yahoo!) as well as tools that merchants can use to get the word out about their business (blogs, coupons, newsletters). There are over 14 million local businesses that have pages on MerchantCircle and any merchant can go to www.merchantcircle.com and enter their phone # to find their page. Once the page is found, merchants can claim it and update it with any marketing information they choose, or correct any inaccurate contact information.

The MerchantCircle service is currently being used by over 50,000 merchants (up from 5,000 at our June launch). We are a small business, just like many of you out there. Your patronage and experience is our most important concern.

MerchantCircle

03 October 06 at 3:13 PM
# bloomery said:

MerchantCircle,

You're not helping. Seriously. I claimed my listing this evening, and what did I see at the bottom? A Google AdWords box, with ads for 1-800-Flowers, CheapFlowers, SuperPages and JustFlowers.

In short, you are listing my competition on "my" listing. That's what I call "negative help". The first listing under Retail Shopping for Butler, PA is 1-800 Flowers. They're hardly local. If your interest is truly local small businesses, I suggest you need to review your listing policies.

03 October 06 at 6:24 PM
# mark_smith said:

Dear Merchantcircle...

The Adwords alone make your site UN-reliable and UN-usable to most traditional Real Florists... if you really want to develope a workable model you need to rethink your direction.

04 October 06 at 4:53 AM
# avantegardens said:

MerchantCircle,

Like Bloomery said, from the standpoint of a local business, your site has some serious issues.

1) The data in flowers categories is fraught with the same phony 'local' companies as yellowpages.com, superpages.com and others. Anaheim, CA's is better than Butler, PA which lists, links to and displays a local zip code for

Express Worldwide - FTD.com

National Flora - FTD.com

Blooms USA - A Virginia-based called center and one of FTD's top affiliate marketers

Americanblooms - Same company as 'Blooms USA'

Flowers & Balloons - A So Cal call center and top Teleflora affiliate reseller

ML Flowers - Same company as 'Flowers & Balloons'

Each of those companies simply adds 'service fees' (as high as $25), extracts commissions/fees of at least 30% and sends the flower orders back to one of the real local florists in Butler.  

This kind of bad data undermines your credibility to the very merchants you seek to engage. I also see no place to easily report these data errors.

2) Anonymous ratings leave merchants with no way to defend their reputations. I'd never heard of your site until last week and yet found we'd been 'rated' with 3 1/2 stars. Why? By whom? At least make raters login and include a 'why' for a rating. There's nothing to prevent reputation-damaging drive-bys by competitors.

3) AdSense from competitors. Bloomery and Boss summed it up nicely.  

I claimed our listing last night and found the process to be easy and well-designed. There are many features that would be a benefit to local businesses, especially those without a current web presence but IMO you need to fix the areas outlined above before gaining the trust - and the ad dollars - of local merchants.

Cathy

04 October 06 at 6:47 AM
# Mike said:

Merchantcircle (Ben),

Your canned reply is just absolute garbage........no real apology........just more spin..........these guys just don't  get it and it's clear they  won't.......ever!!!!

Oh well.........never heard of them a week ago..............there is no doubt they will fail.....karma boys karma.

Mike

04 October 06 at 9:00 PM
# bloomery said:

There's a message here for our customers, too.  Just because you find a site which offers ratings, and just because we're listed there, doesn't mean we endorse the ratings site, nor do we necessarily participate in it.  Leaving a comment or rating on such a site doesn't mean we're going to hear about it.  If any customer has been disappointed with our quality or service, the best thing to do is call us.  We'll do the best we can to make it better.  Plus, you've set in motion a process so that everyone involved knows there was a problem.

The way to make things better (after all, that is the purpose of feedback) is to directly address the merchant, not post a comment on some obscure website.

05 October 06 at 3:39 AM
# Ann said:

Merchant Circle's new scam begins with "your business got a positive rating..." But they have called my office multiple times in the past several days and it's getting really annoying. The contact email they give on their website does not work but, since we have caller ID, I may be able to get action from the telephone company.

BTW: I'm glad we got a positive rating -- although I'm pretty sure that was bogus -- since we are a state agency and we don't have any competition this side of the state line.

11 January 07 at 1:29 PM
# Avante Gardens - florals unique, Anaheim, CA - Orange County Florist Since 1984 said:

Bravo to Rae Hoffman for taking Merchant Circle to task for "doing their best to rank in the search engines

27 March 07 at 6:53 AM

Leave a Comment

Comment Policy: No HTML allowed. URIs and line breaks are converted automatically. Your e–mail address will not show up on any public page.

(required) 
(optional)
(required)