Social Media Advisors

Press “2” To Speak to An Actual Human Being

We’ve all dealt with frustrating phone systems when we’re trying to accomplish something with a bank, large corporation, customer service issue, and more. A few days ago, I was dismayed to realize that dialing “0” even got me into a series of options, one of which was to dial “0” again to speak to an operator. I am not making this up.

My wife was trying to transfer some funds today from a bank in another city. It was like pulling teeth, only less pleasant. It was much like speaking to someone who was trapped in a concrete box with earplugs in, maybe? I don’t think I’ve ever heard her get that loud on the phone when repeating herself.

It made me think of a few choice options that should probably be added to corporate phone systems worldwide:

Press “0” to speak to someone with a higher IQ than the person you’re currently speaking with.
Press “1” to speak to an operator who is not hearing-impaired.
Press “2” to apply a mild electric shock to the operator. A nominal fee will apply.
Press “3” to apply a severe….well, you get the picture on this one.

On a serious note, I really wish that the people who design these phone menus were forced to use them and test them frequently, as I think that would cut down on a large part of the problem.

Here’s another pet peeve while we’re on the topic – I don’t like the ones that make me spell the person’s name to speak with them. I’m a good speller, but I seem to have a knack for getting this option when I don’t even know the person’s last name, and this is the requirement. In other words, if I need to reach Sherry _______ at the insurance company, it’s asking me to spell her LAST name. Dang it.

One company that I’ve called a handful of times (they shall remain nameless here, since it might deserve a post of its own) has one of the worst phone experiences around. You get one person on the phone, explain fully what your issue is, then they try half-heartedly to help before transferring to a specialist. Upon reaching the second person, you must RE-EXPLAIN EVERYTHING again, since they can’t access the notes of the first operator. Ugh.

Don’t even get me started on the voice recognition ones. “I think you said ‘banana’. Is that right?”

I’m sure that companies pay big bucks for these labyrinthine systems. I think I might develop a program to navigate these menus on my behalf, perhaps with an “auto-escalate” feature, since it seems like the most common outcome (“Can I speak to your supervisor?”).

Thanks for reading my semi-rant.

Do You know When Someone Is Stealing From Your Site?

Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

Yesterday morning I was very disturbed when I awoke. As usual one of my first stops for the day is checking my Blackberry to see if there is any new email emergencies from my clients that I need to address. Luckily nobody broke anything over New Years. But, I did notice 3 new emails in my inbox that were showing “New Comments” on old blog posts. Now, this isn’t uncommon to get comments on old posts, but when I opened them up I noticed they were all pingbacks.

Getting pingbacks is not that uncommon either as people from time to time refer back to our blog posts and when they link to them on our WordPress site, we get a notification. But, when there were three that all were used in my recent post predicting Trends for 2011, I knew something was up. So, I followed the pingback which directed me to a scraper site that is just feeding in featured posts on ActiveRain. The person feeding these posts only let like 10 show at a time and have it set that the others cannot be viewed. Unless you go in & look at their feed, then you can find plenty more.

There are zero posts of original content on the site. Also, there is no attribution as to where the stuff comes from. This person is blatantly stealing content from hundreds of people. What is even worse, (if it could get any) they are using a trademarked word their domain. The term REALTOR® is trademarked by the National Association of REALTORS®. I know that many people have tried contacting this person to remove the content which no avail. Hopefully NAR will soon step in as well for the violation and between them & all the idividual complaints the site will be shut down soon.

I thought about adding a link over to the scraper site, but I don’t want to help their business by linking to them or driving traffic their way. The irony of the site is that it is built to sell WordPress Sites to Real Estate Agents. I think if you are going to try & sell a product to a consumer you should start by generating your own unique content and not stealing from others. No matter how sneakily you try to do it, you will be found. Also, using others content will not help you a bit with SEO rankings. As I have done more investigating I have found they actually have several different sites set up all on a .io type of domain.

Each of his sites seem to be some sort of scam. The one I clicked on took me to an app they designed that will automatically email your boss an excuse when you are late for work and miss a call from your boss because you are still sleeping. Sounds like the type of person I would want to hire to work with… This is just another reason why it is imperative to be monitoring your online presence so that you are not a Loser. Also, pay closer attention to your trackbacks & pingbacks to your site, you never know who may be stealing your content.