RANT

My son decided to make brownies last night. Since he is of the Google generation, the thought of a cook book never crossed his mind. Instead, he headed right to his laptop and searched for brownie recipe .

Imagine my surprise when he asked me why Google was suggesting adding weed to his brownies. I consider myself pretty liberal as a parent and I don’t fault Google for returning porn if my child enters a keyword that calls for porn, but I really don’t want them suggesting adding drugs to dessert.

Remember the uproar over Google self promotion less than year ago when Google tried to promote Picasa within natural search by using a “Tips” graphic?

How is it that we have all turned a blind eye when Google uses Onebox to promote their verticals? Why is a tip graphic bad, but no one even talks about how the Housing search completely ignores the algorithm. Imagine you are a small newspaper in wine country that has spent 20 years listing Napa Real Estate and Sonoma Real Estate, including 12 years on the web. Suddenly the top result for a Google search is a competing Google property with no history. I guess your out of luck!

I say that’s evil!

I seem to have never actually announced that I joined Alchemist Media, Inc, a firm a few months ago as the Senior Search Engine Marketing Director. Alchemist Media is one of the leading Search Engine Optimization companies in the world and I am thrilled to be working with them.

As of March 28th, 2008,I am back on my own and very happy to be heading my own SEO - SEM agency.

The opinions expressed here continue to be my own!

Trackback, http://www.measurement.com/Online_Marketing/Berkeley-Toyota-Sucks

Have you been wronged by a company and they won’t do anything about it? Here are 10 things you can do to get even.*

1. Dispute the credit card charge
There is a widely circulated rumor about a merchant who won a charge back dispute, but there is no confirmation it actually happened. Credit card companies almost always side with the consumer when there is a complaint about an online purchase. After hours documenting every interaction with the customer, reciting the terms and conditions and proving they did everything right, companies lose the dispute and pay the charge back along with a processing fee. Savvy merchants don’t even bother to fight payment disputes; it is a waste of time and money.

2. Build a complaint site
Got a lot of time on your hands? A huge percent of online traffic comes from visitors searching for a company by brand name. A complaint site can appear right below (occasionally above) the brand the user is searching for. Google United Airlines and the 3rd result is for Untied.com, a site dedicated to complaints about United.

Negative reviews can obliterate the company’s brand in search engine results. Take the case of a now defunct search engine optimization company called Traffic Power. They decide to sue some bloggers who were critical of them. Instead of silencing their critics, the lawsuits rallied the SEO community, generated thousands of back links to the story on SEOBook and helped propel Aaron Wall into a celebrity. The top ten SERP’s on Google for “Traffic Power” are dominated by websites slamming Traffic Power. Traffic Power is out of businesses.

3. Blog About Your Experience
If you don’t have the time, the skill or the anger to spend weeks building a complaint site, write about your experience and then post to social media sites like Digg and Reddit. Companies invest millions of dollars in their brand - few things are more damaging than having complaints show up on the top of search results.

A blogger wrote about his bad experience buying a camera online and posted it to Digg.com. Beside the usual advice, dig users posted the store’s numerous aliases, phone number and address. Users flooded the 800 number with phone calls, wrote scripts using Skype to call and disconnect, making prank phone calls, launched DOS attacks against the site and posted bad reviews on various websites. Not only did the owners write an apology letter and claim to fire the manager, they had to change their brand. PriceRitePhoto is now BarclaysPhoto and the damaging blog still shows on the first page of results.

Reputation management is a serious issue and a real problem. It could cost the company tens of thousands of dollars promoting favorable reviews to push one complaint posting off the first page of search results and there is no guarantee it will work. It’s not unheard of for the company to offer cash to get someone to take down a bad review. When this happens, savor the moment and don’t accept the first offer…the negotiation has begun.

4. CPC Click Abuse
Unscrupulous people might spend a few seconds every day clicking on paid links for a particular company. Invalid clicks can cost a company a lot of money. For example, the search term “postcard printing” on Google brings up sponsored ads that cost between $5 and $10 dollars per click.

This printer now has 200 legitimate prospects mingled with 1,300 freebie request. Each sample pack cost about $5 to fulfill, so it could cost $6,500 to send 1,300 samples to people who want a freebie. Each legitimate request costs about $25 in marketing, so not fulfilling the 200 legitimate requests would cost $6,000 in invested dollars and around $25,000 lost revenue. In the end, it took at least 30 man-hours to straighten out the mess and another 20 hours for IT to put in a fix. A week later, someone reposted the new link on another site along with instructions on getting around the fix.

6. Better Business Bureau
Even if the company isn’t a member, maintaining a clean BBB file is very important; many consumers will check the BBB before they make their first purchase. A company can be classified as “Not Recommended” with as few as 3 unresolved complaints even if they have a million customers who never complain. It takes many hours of paperwork to respond to each complaint. Even if the company responds, it is still up to the consumer to agree the complaint has been satisfied. Eventually, after spending a lot of staff time, the company may prevail and have the complaint ruled in their favor, but the complaint never gets taken off their record.

7. Write a funny email describing how incompetent the company is
Never underestimate the viral power of a well written email. Send it to everyone you know with the subject of “funny story” and they will send it to their joke list. The trick here is to make sure to paint a portrait of a beleaguered customer faced with an incompetent policy and an unbending bureaucracy. Try Alexa or Epinions if you want to keep going.

8. Link to them
Opinions differ about how much harm can be done to a company by linking to them from “bad neighborhoods” such as link farms, porn sites and affiliate sites that promote online casinos, debt consolidation and viagra. It would probably require a “Black Hat SEO” professional to really do much damage and this will never work for an established company like Amazon.com, but a newer website without a lot of inbound links is certainly vulnerable. (If anyone has a list of ways to get a site penalized or banished, let me know and I will link to you.)

9. Send them Dog Poop
You don’t have to touch it because there are two companies that will do it for you: DogDoo.com or Mailpoop.com

10. Buy from someone else!
The fact is, it takes a lot of money to attract a new customer and it is in the interest of a company to try to retain almost every one.

*This is meant as a cautionary tale for business owners, not a recommendation for consumers. The ROIGuy is not suggesting you take any of these actions. He is not an attorney and has no opinion whether pursuing any of these strategies is a violation of federal, state or local laws or civil statutes.