consumer | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

ABC Christmas Computers

What are the festive technology questions?

For Christmas 2011 Paul joined Nikolai Beilharz to discuss dealing with problems with your Christmas tech gifts.

We had a number of callers with problems including setting up a wireless network, what to do if a drink is spilled on your keyboard and how older people can get useful computer training.

Seniors Computer Assistance

John from Hobart asked about where he could get instructions on using his computer.

The Australian Seniors Computer Clubs Association is a volunteer group bringing together local computer clubs that cater for older folk.

ASCCA’s national members directory lists local clubs by state and contacting the nearest group should help you find the right assistance from your peers.

Oh no! I’ve spilled a drink on my computer?!?

Watching a freshly spilled cup of coffee, glass of wine or can of softdrink pour into your keyboard makes for one half panic and the other half despair.

If you move quickly and you turn the keyboard upside down then you have a chance of rescuing a laptop computer before too much damage is done. The important thing is to stop liquid getting onto important circuits.

Having turned the keyboard or laptop upside down, leave it for a day for the liquid to dry out. Then its a good idea to take it to the local computer store to see if it the residue can be cleaned up as usually the keyboard becomes sticky and some keys may not work.

Should the liquid damage a desktop computer’s keyboard that’s usually easily fixed by buying a new keyboard but if you’re using a laptop, then the motherboard – the key part of a computer’s circuits – may be affected and that’s usually time to start shopping for a new system.

Setting up a wireless network

Most of the tech devices we’re getting for our households require some sort of wireless connection.

If you have a wireless network, it’s important you get the security right as you don’t want neighbours and passers-by using your connection. The IT Queries site has instructions on securing these networks.

Once have a secured network, preferably using the WPA2 encryption standard and a strong password, you can then connect each device. You’ll need the name of the network and the WPA2 password to make it work.

Sometimes some devices want older, inferior security settings and occasionally they just won’t work at all. It may take several attempts to get them to work and it’s worthwhile re-reading our ten tips for setting up technology.

Our next national ABC spot will be on February 9 next year. We will probably have some more spots over the summer break and we’ll let newsletter subscribers know about them as soon as we do. We also post them to the events page.

Comparing local review and search sites

How do the local search services compare?

With the Australian launch of local search and recommendation site Yelp, it’s worthwhile comparing the different sites to see how well they worked.

The sites work in different ways, some – like Sensis Yellow Pages and True Local – are online directories that search just the title and description of business.

Yelp, Foursquare and Word Of Mouth Online, are socially based and derive their searches on the content and number of community reviews. Their algorithms, the formulas to figure out what customers are looking for, are more complex than the basic online directories.

Most complex of all are the hybrid searches, notably Google Places and Facebook Places, that build local upon their search and social media data.

Each model has it’s own strengths and weaknesses which shows when we do a search. Due to time restrictions we only did two.

Looking for brunch in Neutral Bay, NSW

The first search was using what somebody might be expected to search for on a casual weekend or holiday morning. Neutral Bay and surrounding suburbs have plenty of cafes catering to the brunch crowd so it should be expected to return plenty of hits.

Yelp

The new contender only found one local result and the rest being on the other side of the Harbour Bridge, including one at Bondi Beach which may as well be in the Upper Amazon to the average Sydney North Shore dweller.

Interestingly, entering neighbouring suburbs changes the first two or three results to that suburb but the subsequent listings are the same remote locations as for the Neutral Bay query. This might indicate popularity with the current Yelp users or may be part of the package merchants get when they pay for a listing.

True Local

News Limited’s True Local disappointed one cafe in the district was identified and the number one result was in the city.

This poor results are probably due to the word “brunch” not appearing in the local cafes’ descriptions or titles, but this is a serious weakness for True Local, particularly in a district where they dominate the local news media.

Google Places

Surprisingly, Google Places returned an extremely poor result with no local businesses found.

Again, this is probably due to the failure of business owners to ensure keywords are entered in their business description and it illustrates how Google is allowing an opportunity to pass them by.

Facebook Places

Nothing. Nyet. Zip. No brunch for you.

Yahoo!7

Another poor result that has just scraped information off the web. It shows the weakness of the Yahoo! and Channel Seven joint venture which, like News Limited, is letting opportunities pass.

Bing/NineMSN

Probably the most disgraceful of the results, NineMSN returned two cafes for the whole of Sydney, a city of four million people.

The second result entailed, according to Bing’s directions, a 38km drive timed at an optimistic 23 minutes involving $9 in tolls and an illegal u-turn.

NineMSN’s performance shows just how irrelevant Microsoft has become in the online space and their Australian joint venture partner is more interested in selling big integrated campaigns to advertising agencies.

Given NineMSN and Bing are the default browser and search engine on nearly two million computers sold in Australia each year, not having a local business strategy is squandering a massive opportunity.

Citysearch/Sensis

Founded by Fairfax, Citysearch could have been a great success combining the assets and readership of Fairfax’s metropolitan and local newspapers coupled with their experienced sales teams selling advertising space and subscriptions. Good management could have done this.

Sadly Fairfax was being run by Professor Fred Hilmer and his army of power suited McKinsey consultants and Citysearch was eventually sold for a pittance to Sensis, who have allowed it to shrivel away as the zero result for our search shows.

Eatability

Eatability was a genuine surprise, returning no brunch establishments in the area. The only thought is that no cafe in the neighbourhood has the word “brunch” in their keywords. Still a very poor result.

Urbanspoon

The web version of Urbanspoon returned the most bizarre result, correctly finding one local cafe but misinterpreting the address as being in Bankstown on the other side of Sydney.

Urbanspoon’s iPhone app returned a far better range of results in surrounding suburbs although it only found one cafe actually in Neutral Bay which wasn’t the one incorrectly found on their web app, which didn’t appear at all.

Word of Mouth Online

Word Of Mouth Online delivered the best result of the web pages with two of the first three results being relevant. Of the other seven, they met the criteria of being within a 5km radius of the location which in Sydney can be a 12km drive.

The results would have been better with more local establishments but it appears the keyword “brunch” hasn’t been used by many of the WOMO reviewers.

Note: After the review I was contacted by the founder of WOMO, Fiona Adler, it appears some of the reviews have have been updated in the meantime. I’ve changed the results below, but the left the one above as it was correct at the time of the review.

Foursquare

Like Yelp, Foursquare relies heavily on users’ contributions and this shows in the flaky, almost useless results for our search terms on a web based search.

Foursquare’s iPhone app was far more efficient, identifying a range of good venues in the area which were ranked according to friends’ recommendations.

Sensis/Yellow Pages

Again, “no brunch for you.” It’s almost scandalous that Yellow Pages has no entries at all for “brunch” for an inner Sydney suburb.

Redoing the search

Clearly the term “brunch” is problematic in all the services, so as a check here’s the relevant first page results for other search terms on each of the services;

Service	Café Neutral Bay	Breakfast Neutral Bay	Lunch Neutral Bay
Yelp	7/10	2/10	7/10
True Local	9/30	0/30	0/30
Google Place	10/10	0/10	10/10
Yahoo!7		not relevant
Bing/MSN	3/10	0/10	0/10
Citysearch	6/10	3/6	4/4
Eatability	40/50	8/8	23/31
Urban spoon	3/3	0/0	0/0
foursquare	3/20	1/20	1/20
WOMO	8/10	2/10	5/10
Sensis	7/10	0/10	0/10

As we found with the earlier search, Yelp was somewhat inconsistent and no doubt the social aspects will see it improve as more users come on board, the results are highly dependent on the terms used by reviewers and this will affect the search results.

True Local’s score was surprisingly bad, the search for “cafe” found 12 places but three are long closed. “Breakfast” listed B&B accomodation and “lunch” found outlets in the city and Eastern Suburbs.

Google Places also disappointed on “breakfast”, picking up some B&B establishments along with some city cafes. This is almost certainly due to keywords missing in descriptions.

Yahoo!7 doesn’t get a rating as all it does is scrape other sites and often refers you to other search services. They are just going through the motions.

Microsoft and NineMSN’s service again failed dismally; the “cafe” result was poor, “breakfast” looked for B&Bs and “lunch” amazingly didn’t find a thing in Neutral Bay.

Citysearch’s results for “cafe” found nine places, three of which are long closed which indicates the lack of maintenance their database receives. Encouragingly, Citysearch was one of the best performers for lunch and dinner, albeit only on four and six places found.

Eatability had by far the most impressive number of results, however a large proportion of the places have closed and are not flagged as such. This probably indicates a lack of maintenance by the owners.

WOMO was good and like Yelp their results are highly dependent on the words used by reviewers, so key words could be missed simply because reviewers didn’t use them.

Sensis performed well on “cafes” except that three of the ten listed were closed. The lack of results on “breakfast” and “lunch” is due to no places having those words in their name.

Conclusions

This comparison is not scientific, being based on a narrow search and small sample size, but there’s a few things we can take away from the experiment.

Search is still young

Right now, search is still a crude tool.

From the results, we can see that the keywords used by reviewers and businesses matter. If the public are looking for “brunch” and that isn’t on your cafe’s website and online listings, then you won’t appear.

Over time that will change as the web and search engines get smarter but right now search is still at a basic stage in its development.

You have to be there

Customers are using these tools to find what they need and if a business isn’t listed, then they can’t be found. Setting up a profile and getting some favourable reviews is important.

The business who are being pro-active are the ones who are succeeding.

There’s a lot of opportunity

It’s no surprise that older organisations like Fairfax, Sensis and Microsoft are failing to understand local search. What is suprising is how poorly the newer players like Google and Facebook are doing.

This opens up a lot of opportunity for services like Yelp and Foursquare in adding value to the data already available through services like Google, Facebook and Sensis.

Yelp’s tie up with Sensis makes a lot of sense from the US company’s point of view; they get to ride on Sensis’ sales team, maybe some licensing fees and – most importantly – they can access the richest, albeit not always accurate, database of Australian businesses.

For small, local business there’s a lot of opportunity as well. By getting online and registered on these services, it’s possible to become more visible and improve your competitive position.

The market’s young and there’s a lot of potential for disruptive players. It will be interesting to see how incumbents deal with the threat.

Mad, bad or dangerous: The One Percenters we need to avoid

There is a certain type of customer business need to be careful of.

“I’m not going pay you, your technician was constantly looking at his watch,” growled the customer when asked why she’d stopped a cheque for some work we’d done for her.

There’s many excuses for not paying your bills but a tradesman trying to keep the client’s bill to a minimum is an excellent dodge.

Over the phone call’s ten minutes, it was clear this lady was going to be a tough customer.

First the job wasn’t done properly, then the charges were too high, she accused us of taking advantage of vulnerable women and finally she was going to complain about us to her union.

It was clear we were in for a fight to get a hundred dollars from her, so I let it go. She went away believing she was right.

The saying “the customer is always right” was coined by US retail pioneer Marshall Field and exported around the world by Harry Selfridge, one of his employees who also founded a business empire.

We can be sure neither of them actually meant that customers are always correct in what they do, just that the key to successful service is the client walking away believing they are right.

Regardless of how well we deliver on our promises, there are always going to be some that aren’t happy. In most cases this is due to misunderstanding, or just a bad day on our part, but sometimes there’s the one percent of customers who are mad, bad or dangerous.

The Mad

Some customers just aren’t quite with us. These people, some of whom have genuine psychological problems, simply aren’t going to be reasonable.

There’s no point in fighting them as that’s only going to make their issues worse and maybe even transfer some of their problems to you.

Fortunately as you become more experienced in business you get better at detecting and avoiding these type of customers although there’s always the odd one who sneaks through.

The Bad

There’s a certain breed of people – and businesses – who don’t pay their bills, seeing their suppliers as banks and an invoice as an interest free loan.

Often these customers are charming and the perfect client before the bill is presented then they string you out for months of years before paying your invoices.

For these people and organisations, who are genuine deadbeats, there’s the fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me philosophy. It’s usually better to write them off rather than sink hours of management time.

The Dangerous

Of all the bad payers, the most dangerous is the game player. To these people, not paying debts is an intellectual challenge which they enjoy and play for fun.

These folk will just as happily mess around the phone company or the tax office as much as the local plumber or newsagent, it’s just a game which they’ll play to their maximum enjoyment and your frustration.

For the big companies, these people can be a benefit as they justify the existing of entire bureaucracies dedicated in getting them to pay; small business though don’t have the time and resources to spend the hours of work over years to extract payment from them.

Thankfully these folk usually stonewall as the first invoice so there’s early warnings you’re dealing with trouble. Resist the urge to play the game with them as they are usually better at it than you.

Regardless of which category these bad debtors fall into, in each case it’s better for your valuable time and sanity to let them believe they are right, write the debt off and move on to helping customers who really matter.

Fortunately these people really are the One Percenters and only representative of a tiny proportion of our customers.

The taste of copping a loss is always painful, but at least we get good stories from the excuses they give. What’s the best reason you’ve heard for a customer trying to dodge a debt?

What business can learn from Groupon

How can businesses use the web to grow like the group buying companies?

Groupon, pioneer of group buying and one the fastest growing companies in history, will have its launch on the stock markets today with an initial public offering (IPO) that’s values the business at thirteen billion dollars, more double the $6bn that Google offered for the three year old company last year.

A recent Business Insider profile of Groupon had some fascinating insights on this unique company and its growth, there’s a number of lessons that most business owners, entrepreneurs and managers can take from this company’s dramatic growth and market leadership regardless of the sector they operate in.

Apply tech to your business

Many people make the mistake that Groupon is tech startup when it’s actually a sales operation.

Groupon’s business model isn’t really new, what they have done is applied various web technologies to the directory and voucher shopping industries and come up with a 21st Century way of doing things.

Bringing together different modern tools like social media, cloud computing, local search and the mobile web makes businesses more flexible and quick to develop new market opportunities.

Prepare for quick changes

Groupon was born out of another business – The Point. As The Point steadily died, Andrew Mason and his mentor Eric Lefkofsky decided to try something different and Groupon was born.

This ability to change focus quickly – often called “pivoting” – is essential in changing markets. In volatile times like today where today’s business conditions can’t be taken for granted we have to be prepared for rapid changes.

Fortunately the cost and time to changes your business focus has dropped dramatically with digital and online tools, which is another reason to embrace tech.

Get a good business mentor

Eric Lefkofsky bought maturity and a perspective to Groupon’s young leadership, having a different and more experienced view of the business helped it develop and grab the opportunity.

An experienced business mentor can be worth their weight in gold.

Back a good idea

In Nicholas Carson’s Business Insider profile he describes Andrew Mason role at Eric Lefkofski’s business before The Point as “an intern, ‘kind of squatting in their offices'”. Lefkofski was prepared to back the geeky kid camping on his premises.

Putting your prejudices and judgements on the shelf to back good ideas, particularly those that don’t cost much to execute, is one way to find where the opportunities lie.

Tell your business story

Regardless of what you think of Groupon’s claims, they tell a very good story which has lead to their amazing growth and the development of the group buying industry.

Being able to tell your story, in your terms, is one of the great advantages the web, local search and social media deliver. There’s no reason why your business shouldn’t be dominating the local market in whatever field you work in.

Regardless of what your business does, it can benefit from applying the online tools that are available to all of us.

We may not be the next Groupon but the web gives us the opportunity to build our business to take advantage of the 21st Century. It’s worthwhile understanding the new tools at our fingertips.

ABC Nightlife: The next wave of smartphones

Paul Wallbank joined Rod Quinn to look at where mobile phones are going.

The world of mobile phones is getting busy again as a whole new range of smartphones appear. Paul Wallbank joined Rod Quinn for ABC Nightlife on October 20 to discuss what the new smartphone wars mean for home and business users.

We’ll be going to air from 10pm, Eastern Australian time across Australia on ABC Local Radio’s Nightlife to look at the following questions;

Why were people disappointed with Apple’s iPhone 4S that was released a few weeks ago?
The big competition are the Google Android phones, what are they doing?
What’s happened to Nokia? They seemed to have lost their domination.
Microsoft were the other big player, what are they doing?
How are the smartphones changing business?
Shopping centres seem to be jumping on board with various social media checkins. What are those?
There’s been a push to online payments, how are the smartphones affecting this?
Are smartphones going to be the big buy for Christmas?
What are the best plans for consumers and business?
How do people deal with telco disputes?

The podcast from the program is available from at Nightlife website, and some of the information we mentioned can be found here;

Dealing with Telco complaints

We’ll be adding more resources in the next few days, the next ABC Nightlife spot is on 23 November and our events page will have more details. If you have any suggestions for future programs or comments on the last show, please let us know as we love your feedback.

The agents of change

It’s tempting to think social media and other web tools are driving change, but much deeper things are changing.

It’s understandable technologists see technology as driving change. Often it’s true – technologies do build or destroy businesses, alter economies and collapse empires.

Sometimes though there’s more to change than a new technology changing the economy and while it’s tempting to credit innovations like the web, social media and cloud computing with many of the changes we’re seeing in the world, we have to consider some other factors at work.

The end of the 40 year credit boom

In the 1960s, the United States started creating credit to pay for the Vietnam war; they never stopped and after the 2001 recession and terrorist attacks the money supply was kept particularly loose.

The worldwide credit boom allowed all of us –Greek hairdressers, Irish home borrowers, Australian electronics salesmen, US bankers and pretty well everyone else in the Western world – to live beyond our means.

In 2008, the start of the Great Recession saw the end of that period and now the economy is deleveraging. Consumers are reluctant to borrow and businesses struggle to find funds to borrow even if they want to.

Any business plans built on the idea of almost unlimited spending growth are doomed. The era of massive consumer spending growth driven by easy credit is over and the days of expecting a plasma TV in every room are gone.

The aging population

An even bigger challenge is that our societies are getting older, the assumption we have an endless supply of cheap labour is being challenged as a global race for talent develops.

The lazy assumption that economic growth can be driven by building houses and infrastructure to meet increased demands will be found wanting as the Western world’s populations fail to grow at the rates required to power the construction industries.

Our societies are maturing and increased economic growth and wealth is going to have to come from clever use of our resources.

Innovations in computers and the Internet – along with other technologies like biotech, clean energy and materials engineering – will help us meet those challenges but they are tools to cope with our transforming societies, not the agents of change themselves.

Had tools like social media come along in the 1970s or 80s they probably would have been massive drivers for change, just like the motor car and television were earlier in the 20th Century. In the early 21st Century they have been overtaken by history.

Smart businesses, along with clever governments and communities, will use tools like social media, local search and cloud computing with the demographic and economic changes, but we shouldn’t think for a minute the underlying challenges will be business as usual.

Technology with Carol Duncan on ABC Newcastle

On ABC 1233 Newcastle with Carol Duncan we discuss privacy and security on social media after Facebook’s privacy changes.

In the occasional tech spot with Carol Duncan, we looked at Facebook’s new changes and what they mean to users.

The immediate changes to Facebook are the News Feed at the top of the page where updates and posts will be ranked according to what Facebook thinks are your interests, to the left of the screen is “the ticker” which will give summaries of updates.

Coming in the next few weeks will be the Timeline feature which will give show the history of all your posts.

A great summary of the changes with a hands on review is Jason Kincaid’s article on the Facebook changes in Tech Crunch. The official Facebook blog goes into the detail of all the new features.

The purpose of these changes is to increase Facebook’s value as an advertising platform and it raises the question of the viability of these networks.

One of the interesting features of these changes is that users will start seeing increased advertising, if you’re not happy with this our Netsmarts site goes through the process of shutting down your Facebook account.

Join us on ABC Newcastle with Carol Duncan to discuss these issues and more.

Trusting online reviews

How do we spot fake reviews on sites like Tripadvisor, Yelp! and Eatability

Review sites where customers can post their experiences are changing consumer behaviour and bringing a new level of accountability to businesses, but how do we trust the comments on which appear online?

Travel review site Tripadvisor is a good example of how consumers are able to spread the word about their good and bad business experiences, much to the displeasure of the UK hotel industry and its media friends. To make things worse, many of those reviews are further spread by social media services like Twitter and Facebook.

While the travel industry complains about fake reviews from competitors and disaffected customers, the majority of fake reviews are from hoteliers themselves pumping up their own business. It’s always interesting how many gushing reviews are from anonymous posters with only one or two reviews to their name.

Should any of the threatened court cases actually make it before a judge, there may be a few hoteliers finding themselves in an uncomfortable position, a classic case of being careful about what you wish for.

That’s not to say Tripadvisor doesn’t have a problem, the comments in a recent Telegraph story about the service show they have the web 2.0 problem of lousy customer support which comes from a low cost, user generated business model.

A more serious point which is overlooked by most of the critics is that Tripadvisor, like most travel sites, is linked to certain booking services. If you attempt to use the site to book a property that isn’t aligned with the site, it may well falsely report there are “no rooms available”, which is deceptive and will almost certainly fall foul of competition laws in most countries.

For users of sites, it means we have to be careful with what the reviews and the sites themselves tell us. So what should we watch for?

Spotting dodgy reviews

The obvious thing is the planted review. The easiest way to spot this is by the number of reviews submitted by the commenter.

If a commenter only has one or two reviews then it’s almost certain they either have an axe to grind or they have been submitted by the establishment or it’s staff as most rational people don’t have the energy or time to build a comprehensive profile of reviews just to shaft one place.

Another useful tactic is to look at the reviews around it, do others disagree with that reviewer or are they consistent? Outlier bad reviews can indicate a plant, a grudge or simply a bad day in the kitchen.

Dealing with bad reviews

As we’ve pointed out before, consistent bad reviews on these sites usually indicate a structural problem in the business however if you suspect a fake or planted review, most services have a “flag as inappropriate” option or a dispute mechanism.

Be careful using these however as flagging a legitimate complaint as malicious or fake may antagonise the poster and give the poor review more publicity than you would like.

The social aspects of the web, such as review sites and social media services like Twitter and Facebook, are going to become more important over the next few years as internet users use them to help sift through the massive amount of information on the net.

All businesses, whether in hospitality or other industries, need to take these sites and the reviews on them seriously.

Apple after Steve Jobs: ABC Weekend computers

What does Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple’s CEO mean to Mac users?

The September 11 ABC 702 Sydney Weekends segment discussed what Steve Jobs’ stepping down as Apple CEO means for Mac users.

Simon Marnie and Paul Wallbank looked at why Steve Jobs was important to Apple, who will be taking over and whether this affects whether you should buy an Mac computer, iPhone or iPad.

Listeners’ Questions

As usual, we had plenty of great questions from listeners and some of them we promised to get back to, these included the following.

Removing Mackeeper

Cheryl called about MacKeeper warnings that keep popping up on her Apple computer.

MacKeeper, and other variants like MacProtector and MacSecurity, are known as malware – software designed for malicious reasons – which has been the bane of Windows computer users for years.

Removing Mackeeper is relatively easy and Apple has released a security patch to fix it. Details and download are available at the Apple Support website.

Wiping an old computer

The most valuable thing on a computer is the data, so it’s important to wipe any system before disposing of it. Deborah asked how to wipe her old Mac system before she left it out for her council’s e-waste collection.

If you have an OS X or OS 9 disk, you can completely wipe and “zero” the disk to make it extremely difficult for someone to recover any data from the old computer. Apple have detailed instructions on this at their How To Zero All Data On A Disk page.

Warning! Before following these instructions, make sure you have backed up all important and valuable data.

How to disable automatic Windows Updates

Updating your computer, whether you have a Windows or Mac computer, is very important as new security bugs are found all the time. Gary though was finding his system automatically installing Windows Updates often disrupts his work.

It isn’t a good idea to totally disable the Windows Update service as those updates and patches are important, but you can change the settings so they are downloaded but not installed until you choose to do so.

Microsoft’s Knowledge Base describes how to change the Windows Update Settings, we recommend the download updates but let me choose when to install them option.

Next 702 Weekends tech spot

Our next Weekends spot is scheduled for 23rd October when we’ll be discussing how to backup your valuable data. Check the Events Page or subscribe to our newsletter for any changes to the 702 Sydney programs and any other upcoming radio shows.

The online review challenge

Customers’ web reviews matter for your business. How do you handle bad online comments?

Last Christmas a group of office workers gathered at a city hotel to celebrate the year’s end. The meal was a disaster as slow, surly staff made mistakes and delivered poorly cooked food.

Within an hour of the workers returning from lunch, negative reviews of the hotel started appearing on the Eatability and Urbanspoon websites. By the time Christmas Day rolled around, the reputation of the establishment was throughly trashed.

The rise of online review sites along with social media services like Facebook challenges many businesses, particularly those in the hospitality industry as café owners, restaurateurs and hotel managers struggle with unfavourable comments about their establishments.

Customers now research on the web before deciding to dine out or make a purchase, so online reviews can make or break an establishment. How does a business make sure their online reputation is safe.

Pay attention

The most important part is to pay attention to what people are saying about your business.

Big corporations will have their own social media staff and community managers to handle much of this, Telstra last week announced their online team will now be on the web 24/7.

Larger organisations will also subscribe to online monitoring services like BuzzNumbers and PeopleBrowsr to report what’s being said about them.

For smaller businesses it falls on the owner and staff to keep an eye on the popular review sites and to monitor the business’ Facebook page for negative comments.

Engage the critics

No matter how good your business is, you will get the odd unhappy customer. When that happens you need to contact them, preferably through the same public forum they have complained about you.

Once you’ve established contact, take the discussion offline onto email, phone or even face to face meetings. If the resolution is positive, try to publicise the result in the original channel the complaint was made.

Fix the problem

Despite many in the hotel industry believing that most online complaints are deliberate campaigns against them, regular complaints are usually legitimate and indicate an underlying systemic problem in the business.

If customers are complaining about service, you need to let your staff know customers are talking about them. Should there be regular criticisms of your food, then you need to talk to your kitchen staff or suppliers.

Don’t get defensive

Complaints happen. Even the best business in the world has a bad day or encounters a customer who woke up on the wrong side of bed.

If you think the criticism is unfair or even defamatory, don’t get angry and certainly do not make threats as you’ll only inflame the situation more.

Should the customer turn out to be unreasonable, at least by having publicly engaged them you’ll have shown the public you’re calm, professional and trustworthy.

Don’t Lie

The web is as great at exposing falsehoods as it is at spreading them. If you’re clearly not telling the truth, you’ll make your critics angrier and more determined to damage your reputation.

A common way many businesses cheat online is with false reviews. Despite industry claims that organised damaging comments are widespread, the reality is the opposite as many hoteliers and restaurateurs frequently post clumsy and obviously fake glowing reviews of their establishments. It’s a bad look and the establishment often ends up looking foolish.

Get your website right

Many businesses, particularly in hospitality, have lousy websites or a site that has no Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so when someone searches for a hotel or restaurant their page comes up way below those for review sites or critical blog posts.

Regularly review how your site is doing and talk to your web designer or SEO consultant on making sure it’s coming up well when customers search for your type of business.

It’s important not to overlook local search services so ensure your business has been listed on Google Places and has a Facebook Local Business Page otherwise local searches will go to the online review sites or your competitors.

Ultimately, the best way to deal with negative online reviews is to minimise them by running a good business. The biggest effect the web is having on business is that it is making us accountable to our customers.

As big corporations are finding, the days of covering up poor goods and indifferent customer service with marketing is over – if your product doesn’t match the promise you make to your customers they will tell the world.

The Privacy Processors: How social media is re-manufacturing our identities

Are the costs of social media networks becoming too high?

Most of us accept that things we don’t pay for – such as broadcast TV and Internet sites – are supported by advertising or have some sort of catch in order to pay their bills.

Social media sites have been a great example of this, millions of users on services like Facebook and LinkedIn have accepted targeted advertising and the associated privacy trade offs as the cost of getting a free online service.

The price of “free” though is escalating, the social networks have moved on from just using our data for displaying advertisements to processing our private information and distributing it in ways we may have never expected.

Professional networking site LinkedIn caused an uproar last week when their social advertising feature started adding what appeared to be users’ personal endorsements to adverts for products, businesses and websites based on behaviour monitored by the site’s tracking software.

Facebook, the leading social networking site, also had a recent privacy scare when users discovered the services’ Phonebook feature gleefully displays all the mobile phone numbers of their online contacts and, given the right settings, merges them with those from a mobile phone.

The recently launched Google Plus takes these risks even further as the search engine giant requires a personal profile before you can use the service which can then be integrated into your search and email histories.

What we’ve ‘Liked’ or ‘Followed’ online – or even just looked at – is now being processed, regurgitated and delivered to our friends and the public as endorsements and recommendations just like a retired sportsman selling air conditioners or hair restoration products.

At least the retired cricketer flogging hair products or long past it soap opera star promoting washing powder gets a paycheck, all a social media user gets from the transaction the privilege of sharing their private information along with personal and professional relationships with a multinational advertising platform.

In some ways the social advertising functions are worse for the user than the celebrity endorsement; most people know the retired sportsman or actress is doing it for a paycheck, the social network advertising clearly implies your friends like that product or company.

We should also remember it’s not just the sites themselves, one of the reasons for Facebook’s popularity has been the games and applications people can use. Every one of these features has some access to your data and most have a business model for using it to make a buck.

It’s become common for online applications to send out messages on new users’ accounts, pretending to be a personal message from them. Just this week a new service invoked the ire of Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for doing exactly this.

This processing of our own data and services is a logical step for social media services desperate to justify billion dollar valuations of their business but few people signed up to these sites to endorse random products or allow someone else to send advertising on their behalf.

Privacy is no longer the issue with social media services, we’ve now moved into the corporate ownership of our identities. What a corporate algorithm decides are our likes is now being processed and publicly displayed as our endorsements, our tastes and dislikes.

What interests us, what we enjoy and what we like forms the core of our identities, friendships and personalities. That social media sites seek to take this from us should be our greatest concern with these platforms.

We need to be careful with what, and whom, we share, like and connect with online.

The web’s big weakness

How a hands-off customer model may doom many of today’s social media and web services

There’s a fundamental flaw in the way the tech industry does business, that weakness could be what ultimately kills many of today’s new media, web and social media services.

AirBnB, an online home share service, is one of the darlings of the booming Silicon Valley start up sector, having recently being valued at $1.2 billion after a successful capital raising.

Like most Web 2.0 and social media businesses, AirBnB’s advantage is in the low operating costs where customer support is left to the service’s peer review and social media communities while AirBnB pockets a commission for simply making the connection between the landlord and tenant.

The flaws in this “all care, no responsibility” model became apparent last month when a lady posted a description of her house being ransacked by an errant housesitter she found through AirBnB.

AirBnB’s management responded to the article with assurances they were helping and working with their affected customer, claims which were promptly contradicted by the original victim.

To make matters worse, certain prominent members of the Silicon Valley investment and blogging communities alluded she was lying or was “batshit crazy.” Now that other stories of bad AirBnB tenants are appearing, the view this is simply the untrustworthy word of a deranged customer affected by their first such incident is looking hollow.

Failing to deal with customer problems is not unique to AirBnB, hiding behind impenetrable layers of “support” backed up by user hostile terms and conditions is familiar to anyone who has had to deal with an online service gone wrong.

Last month Thomas Monopoly found he was locked out of his Google account and had it not been for the intervention of a senior Google employee, Thomas’ problem would probably still be stuck in an endless feedback loop.

Exactly the same problem has been encountered thousands of times by other users of web mail, social media, online auction and matchmaking sites.

Many of the people running these services retort their products are free so users get the support the support they pay for – an argument conveniently overlooking that most “free” web services are based around selling customer data – but even this does not justify delivering the basic services users have been lead to expect, regardless of what a 5,000 word user agreement states.

Today’s tech startups, and many of their big established cousins in the IT industry, have the idea that customer support is an optional extra and an expense to minimised or outsourced.

In this respect they are not too far removed from dinosaur car manufacturers or some of today’s less dynamic retailers offering little in the way of customer service or after sales support.

That way of working has died as consumers have been able to go online to vent their dissatisfaction, strangely today’s hot tech start ups seem to have missed this aspect of the revolution they have helped start.

Ignoring consumer problems is exactly what’s bringing traditional businesses unstuck in the online world. The funny thing is it might bring many of the online business undone as well.