Surreal MerchantCircle Uproar/Smear Campaign
Scandal! Scandal! Scandal in the local ad world!
In a truly bizarre occurance, John Battelle, noticing that a months-old post on MerchantCircle was buzzing with disgruntled comments by small businesses claiming to have been harassed by an automated MerchantCircle voicemail alerting them to a negative review. He suggested it was the magestical nature of search and word of mouth, since that post was ranked number three in a Google search related to Merchant Circle.
Peter Krasilovsky, author of the excellent LocalOnliner blog, had also written about MerchantCircle in the past and received a similar inundation of comments claiming fraud. But he smelt a rat. All the comments are in a similar voice, referring to the word scam and always referencing previous comments. The IP addresses map to different ISPs, so if it were a false smear campaign, it was well enacted.
But were the automated calls even placed? Matt Mcgee, who authors a blog for small business marketers, puts an even more bizarre twist on the story. A company he works with, got one of the MerchantCircle automated voicemails saying their busniess had a negative review. Except they didn’t. No one had rated their business.
In Battelle’s latest post, the CEO of Merchant Circle Ben Smith all but admits to using the automated voicemails. “We have been experimenting with many different methods of informing merchants when their listing changes,” he says. Lamenting that “for a while the entire team of 9 personally contacted local merchants”.
So there you have it. Looks like automated technology went wrong, contacting too many businesses (a shame they didn’t screw up by telling people they had positive reviews) and then a strange comment spam/legitimate word of mouth merchant backlash.
And like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives…
I recieved a negative review call two days ago, went to the site and found no review at all. I am not a made up person or spam backlash.
Hi nikiscevak
We wanted to give you an update with the latest information and give everyone a chance to email us directly if they have more questions. 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 foodâ€). 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 http://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
Watch who you accuse of a “smear campaign,” buddy. MerchantCircle are fraudsters, pure and simple.
On March 28, 2006, they used a robot (with no recourse to a human) to call my phone and deliver an ad, in violation of both the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 and the federal Do-Not-Call list.
Then, on September 16 and 26, a “member merchant” outside my area, whom I never heard of, and who is certainly no customer of mine sent me two e-mails urging me to join MerchantCircle (or MerchantCircle “borrowed” his registration information and sent them to me “on his behalf”). On September 16, I responded by entering a negative review on his MerchantCircle listing and denouncing him as a spammer (I ignored the message of the 26th).
Then on the 27th, I received the following message on my voice mail from 866-849-3243:
http://wordengardens.com/scam/merchantcirclespam.mov
Like the other people, I found that nobody had entered any ratings for me at all. Refusing to “activate my account” just to see if I had any ratings, I instead entered two positive testimonials for neighboring businesses that I use, businesses who also had not “activated their accounts,” and I saw that when ratings were actually present, they appeared whether or not the “owner” had activated his account. Since my own listing was devoid of ratings, that means that MerchantCircle flat out lied to me.
I made the above recording available online in response to your question, “But were the automated calls even placed?” Yes, they were placed. No, this isn’t an “organized smear campaign.” And yes, MerchantCircle are frauds and spammers, and I’ll be damned if I ever deal with them. I hope they die a nasty, smelly, public death in the marketplace.
[…] A surreal episode erupted around local search startup MerchantCircle recently, involving an uproar that accused the firm of mass spam and deception and created a strange reaction that made some wonder if the attack was being staged and co-ordinated by someone else. […]