One of the key considerations we espouse is maintaining a profile rather than simply setting it up. Why? Because then you’ll know what people are saying and be able to respond accordingly. However, problems can arise from time-to-time, as a recently settled lawsuit involving a review posted on Yelp.com about a Chiropractor in San Francisco. So, what should you be aware of, how can you make the best of it and what should you do when something goes wrong?

Some Background
By way of background, it’s worth looking at what happened with the Yelp Lawsuit: a customer of a Chiropractor in the USA placed a review on Yelp.com, making allegations about the practitioner he had visited. The review was made public and came to the attention of the Chiropractor, who considered it defamatory and sued.

Yelp has just recently launched in the UK, going head-to-head with a host of other sites like Qype.co.uk, TripAdvisor and BrownBook (amongst a number of others) which are becoming busier and more popular by the day.

The Yelp case has just been settled – out of court – so we won’t ever know the agreement they reached, but the stance of the two parties’ lawyers tells us something about the challenge review sites pose by asking an intriguing question: is a review an opinion or a statement of fact? If it’s the former, then in the USA it’s constitionally protected; if it’s a fact, then it’s potentially libellous. Whilst the legal implications on this site of the pond may be different to those over there (of course we’d always advise consulting a lawyer if you’re in any doubt!), the practical implications are universal.

So, how can you as a web site owner take advantage of the situation and deal with the problems that may arise? Are you scared of the potential negative publicity you might face? We’d recommend following our guidelines on dealing with Review Web Sites:

1. Take a Proactive Approach
The first thing you must do is claim the listing with whichever site you’re looking at. The method for this varies from site to site but in most cases it’s a fairly quick, if a little fiddly, thing to do.

Secondly, you should furnish the listing as best you can. Add a good, honest and positive description of your business; add some photos; add whatever else the site lets you. Afterall, it’s another window onto your company and you want to look your best, don’t you?!

Thirdly, you’ll need to drum up some reviews – the best way to do this is to contact a few happy customers and ask if they’d mind writing one for you. You’re best to explain what the site is about, why you’re asking them to do it and how they should go about it.

Remember – the chances are, the more positive reviews you have, the higher up you’ll rank not only when someone does a search directly on the review site but also in main search engine ranking pages.

2. Provide Open Channels for Communication
If you make it easy for people to get in touch with you, then you make it easy to find out about problems before they get too serious.

In addition to making contact details on your web site clear, take care to include them clearly on your invoices, letters and emails. Most importantly, encourage people to get in touch.

3. Mop Up Problems Before They Hit the Web
Whatever business you’re in, and however well you satisfy your customers, it’s inevitable that problems, perhaps completely outwith your control, will arise from time to time. Our strong advice is to mop these problems up and deal with them completely before a customer has a chance to vent their frustration on the web.

During a transaction, or immediately afterwards, encourage customers to tell you how things are going. Ask them what else you can do to help. Are there any little niggles you can take care of? Chances are they’ll let you know and you can sort them out there and then.

4. Be Open and Honest
If you make a mistake, let the customer know and at the same time let them know what you’re doing to fix it. If you can keep the customer on-side even during a difficult time, then the chances are they won’t go spouting off as soon as you’re out of ear-shot. There’s even a chance they’ll praise you for the speed and efficiency with which you sort something out.

5. Don’t Worry About the Crazies
With a little luck, you won’t ever need to worry about it, but in case you find yourself on the receiving end of an inaccurate, misleading or exaggerated review written by that frankly infuriating customer you had a few weeks ago, don’t be too concerned.

Some sites will provide you as the business owner with the ability to respond to a customer’s review, so you can balance things out. For example, if other customers knew that the person who made ridiculous statements about the cleanliness of your hotel also made off with two pillows and half the towels, they might take the review with a pinch of salt.

Likewise, as humans we’re fairly capable of filtering out the overly bad or overly good reviews to make a balanced assessment of how good a restaurant, shop or guest house actually is.

6. Don’t be Daft
Please don’t write your own review, really, don’t do it, even if it seems like a good idea at the time, it’s really not, in fact it’s a terrible idea and you’ll be found out sooner or later. You’ll probably find rotten fruit coming your way at high speed as disgruntled customers convey their anger.

Need Some Help?
If you need help or advice on claiming, setting up or managing your organisation’s listings, we can help. We can take care of everything for you, and ensure your listings are as smart as they can be.

Get in touch with us on 0845 224 7428 or drop us an email at hello@mackerelmedia.co.uk

In the past I’ve been a bit of a die-hard when it comes to digital music. Although I’m a huge fan of iTunes and I’m on my second iPod, thus far I’ve been a little resistant to purchasing digital-only music. I have purchased a couple of iTunes plus albums, but apart from that everything in my collection has been ripped from CDs I’ve bought. Why am I boring you with this background? Well, I was recently introduced to Spotify and I think it might have completely turned my attitude to digital music upside-down. And, if it’s done that to me, chances are it will do the same for thousands, if not millions of other music-lovers.

But why? It totally removes the need for an on-disk music library. It has the potential to be an iTunes killer, and an Amazon MP3 killer, and in fact the death knell for any other download-based music service you’d care to mention. By eschewing the traditional model of downloading tracks to your PC or Mac, Spotify streams the music to you, on demand. Unlike the other ‘iTunes Killers’ that aim to replace the desktop application and/or  subvert DRM, Spotify totally changes eliminates the music-ownership model.

How Does it Work Then?

First off, you sign up for one of three accounts:

• Free – which is ad-supported
• One Day Pass - gives you 24 hour access for £0.99
• Monthly Subscription - ad free and gives you more features for £9.99 a month

Then you download the application to your computer, search for what you want to listen to, and away you go. Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? And it sounds fairly run-of-the-mill as well? Not worth getting excited about? You’d be dead wrong.

Spotify’s aim is to have everything available for listening to. Everything. It’ll take them time to do that, but right now, there’s an absolutely amazing choice of music. Since signing up barely a week ago I’ve listened to some old favourites, albums by artists I already know and love, and music from artists I’ve never heard of before. Without Spotify, I wouldn’t have been introduced to the amazing ‘Smokin’ O.P.’s‘ by Bob Seger, I wouldn’t have heard the Stereo MCs ‘Live at the BBC‘ (that took me back!) and I certainly wouldn’t have listened to Eilert Pilarm and his staggeringly bad rendition of Suspicious Minds (it’s really something). Piano trio jazz, my favourite music, is very well served indeed, thanks to the huge back catalogue going back to the 1950s.

A New Digital Marketing Opportunity?

One of the reasons I’m particularly excited about Spotify (aside from pure geekery) is that it presents a new and very compelling digital marketing opportunity. I mentioned the Ad-Supported Free Version and whilst most of the ads have been for HMV or “MADAGASCAR THE MOVIE!!”, an ad for Snow Patrol caught my attention and caused me to act. When was the last time you acted a few seconds after a radio ad? Or a banner ad? Err…

The ad started with a member of the band introducing himself and encouraging you to listen to their new album, which is of course available on Spotify. In that instant, the interface changed to show me the album and gave me a link to their biography and back catalogue.

So that was me – I played the album, listened to it all the way through and also checked out some Bon Iver, also recommended  by Snow Patrol.

Looking back on it, I was amazed at just how compelling the ad was, even at this early stage. As the number of advertisers grows, and as the profiling improves, so the integration between advert and action will improve. And with that will come more effective advertising – neatly solving the problem of how to finance digital music.

Sad to say, I could almost see a day when I don’t buy another iTunes track or a CD and simply stick to Spotify. Given a couple of years, the catalogue will be even bigger, they’ll have videos in there, movies potentially…

If I Were Steve Jobs

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I’d do if I was Steve Jobs, but in this case, if I were him I’d be firstly very worried and secondly looking for my cheque book.

I’m not one for predictions but this really could be the iTunes killer, unless it’s snapped up whole by Apple before it gets too big.

What Do You Think?

Share my enthusiasm? Disagree with my assessment of Eilert Pilarm? Let us know with a comment!

We’ve been working on a couple of campaigns for different clients, playing the game, patiently waiting for new links to be established. Out of the blue, we found we had two fantastic links on our hands – from two of the most visible sites on the web, let alone in the UK. Both The Guardian Newspaper and The Sun are sending traffic to sites we manage. Needless to say we were very pleased, as it was somewhat unexpected.

What was the secret to this? Content, pure and simple. It just goes to show that for all the talk of enticing links through quality content, it’s quite true. And whilst these not might be the Holy Grail of links, (we’re still holding out for that elusive front-page-of -Google link – we might be waiting a while!) it shows that with a little effort, directed cleverly, you can achieve great results.

1. Know Who Does What

Many web design and development companies will sub-contract work to other groups. They do this to keep costs down and be able to deliver a wider range of services without the associated overheads.
For a client, this represents risk – being fully aware of who does what is essential in being able to plan for a disaster.

The most common scenario is that a design company outsources the programming work to a technical agency. In this case, the biggest risk is that the technical company goes out of business, leaving the design company and you in the lurch. You might lose access to source code, access to the hosting server or any ongoing support.

In a best-case scenario, you can simply contract another company to support you.

In the worst-case scenario, you have to have an entirely new web site built from scratch – a potentially expensive process!

To mitigate this risk, insist on knowing who does what and insist on being able to contact the sub-contractor directly. You need to know who they are, how the relationship works, who owns what and how you can be supported if one of them goes out of business.

2. Host Your Domain Names Separately

From a client’s point of view, letting your web developer take care of all your domain name, development and hosting needs is very convenient. You deal with one company and don’t need to worry too much about talking to other providers or dealing with subjects beyond your technical knowledge.

However, consider that if this is the case, and your developer goes out of business, it could take months to recover access to your domain names. That means all your email could be interrupted for weeks. Of course as the developer handled hosting as well, you aren’t able to put a note on your Home Page (which is probably offline anyway) telling clients to email you at a different address.

If you had hosted your domains separately, you could very quickly redirect visitors to a holding page, rather than a blank screen. Nor would your email be affected.

A further consideration is the value of your domain names. If you own a sought-after domain, there’s a chance you could lose it – if it’s up for renewal when the developer goes bust, someone might swoop in with impeccable timing and re-register it, taking it away from you.

So, the message is simple – host your domain names entirely separately from your web developer and your hosting company. That way, you’re in control and you can take the measures you need to if something goes wrong.

The best way to do this is to use a separate domain name host and registrar like 123-reg and maintain the account yourself.

Another problem to be aware of is that if someone else registered a domain name on your behalf, they may be listed as the Registrant, rather than you. This further complicates the recovery process if the company fails. To mitigate against this risk, insist that your provider tells you exactly what the registrant details say and if they’re wrong, ask them to change them (they’ll need to get in touch with Nominet if it’s a .uk domain). It’s easy to find this information – you just need to perform a WHOIS query on the domain.

In case you think this isn’t something to worry about, we’ve seen it happen and it took us about two months to recover a client’s domain name.

3. Own the Relationship with your Hosting Company

The majority of web development companies don’t host in-house – for them it simply makes better business sense. They can concentrate on doing their work well, and leave the tricky business of infrastructure to the specialists.

For you as a client, this represents a significant risk as more often than not, the development company owns the relationship with the hosting company. If the developer goes out of business, it’s likely that the hosting company will simply switch off your hosting server.

You then have to deal with the hosting company to take over ‘ownership’ of your service. They may be reluctant to do that – after all, there might be outstanding bills. This can leave you in a difficult situation where you have to wait for a company to move through liquidation before you can regain access to your site. This might take weeks or even months. Can you afford to have your site offline for that long?

The best way to mitigate this risk is to own the relationship with the hosting company directly. You sign the contract with them, you pay the bill every month. That way, if the developer falls by the wayside, the hosting isn’t interrupted.

A great source of information on hosting companies is Netcraft.com – they publish a list of the world’s best-performing hosting companies, ranked by uptime.

4. Maintain Regular Backups

You may well have a backup running on the server itself but in the case of your development company going bust, will that be enough? If there are unpaid bills aplently, or if the company is in administration, you may face the dual problem of your site being offline and the hosting company refusing you access to migrate it to another provider.

To get around this, you need to make sure you retain a backup copy of the site separately to any backups that happen on the server.

In an ideal situation your developer would provide you with:

• All source code for the site
• All files resident on the server
• A regular copy of the database
• Instructions on migrating the site to another hosting platform

It might be the case that the Licensing Rights you agreed to prevent these from being released: you may have a License to use a Content Management System, for example, rather than ownership.

The easiest way to mitigate this risk is to enter into an ESCROW agreement with your web developers. This involves their placing the source code in a secure environment with an ESCROW service; should the business go bust, the code is released to you.

Bear in mind that if your site is particularly dynamic, and has grown considerably over the years, the content (which would belong to you) is the most significant part of the mix. In this case it makes great sense to maintain a copy of the content locally. A copy of the content database would be better though – and make sure it’s up to date!

5. Talk to Other Developers

To recover from a disaster quickly, you need to know who you can turn to and who can support your site if your developer goes bust.

The best way to do this is to speak regularly to other companies and maintain a note of their capabilities.

It’s ideal to have a couple of names handy so you aren’t forced into using someone you don’t particularly like, or who is particularly expensive.

If the worst happens, chances are the companies you’ve spoken to will be very keen for the business and will be eager to help you out.

6. Have a Disaster Recovery Plan in Place

As you can see, quite a number of things can go wrong when a development company goes out of business and the fallout has the potential to last a couple of months.

As ever, the way to reduce the risk is to have a comprehensive Disaster Recovery Plan in place that can be swung into action as soon as it needs to be. It should cover each of the points above and clearly set out a procedure for the recovery of your site.

How We Can Help

Our experience and advice comes from having helped clients whose web developers have gone out of business. We know first hand how serious a problem it can be and – crucially – how to sort it out. We provide clear, calm and level-headed advice.

If you’re concerned about your supplier and would like to be able to put in place a plan, Get In Touch with us and we’ll be happy to help.

The famous numerals on the front door of 10 Downing Street

I was particularly keen to use WordPress to power this site as I’ve long been a fan of its power, simplicity and open approach. There is a huge community of users and contributors behind it and it’s rapidly gaining a more mainstream following through wordpress.com.

So I (along with many others) was pleased to read today that Gordon Brown (that’s our British Prime Minister for those who have been asleep for the past year) has just launched a new WordPress-powered web site (blog) at www.number10.gov.uk

Obviously the site will be busy – very busy indeed. So it’s fantastic to see that the developers consider it fit to be a stable platform. Already there has been a huge amount of chatter about the Super Cache plugin, which the site uses.

It’s also good to see that Mr Brown has a Flickr account (does he comment on other photos in his spare time?) – he’s (remarkably) embracing digital marketing.

It will be interesting to see how the site develops – I imagine that it will end being being a trailblazer for other high-profile sites. I hope also that the experience of running it will be fed back into the WordPress community, benefiting everyone.

Keen to Know More?
We built this site using WordPress and work with other clients to do the same. Please Contact Us if you’d like to know more about using WordPress as a blogging or digital marketing tool.

Google recently generated some conversation after a posting on the Webmaster Blog that received a very mixed reception, with some commentators calling it old news and others lapping it up. Our experience shows that the issue is alive and well. Many organisations still face huge problems when they make a decision to move to a new domain. So, is moving the right thing to do? Let’s take a look….

Why Change Domain Name?
For the purposes of this post we’re assuming that the change of domain name is in strict terms unnecessary – that the existing or old domain could continue.

We fully appreciate that changing a domain is perfectly acceptable under many circumstances.

What we’ve seen a few times now are the problems caused when an organisation decides to change when there isn’t actually a need to. Whilst the change might make sense from a branding point of view, perhaps to satisfy a subtle shift in marketing strategy,  it may not make sense from a marketing or search engine optimisation point of view. This can happen even when the explicit intention is to improve SEO, as we’ll see.

Whilst this might seem to be a narrow lens with which to view the problem, it is becoming increasingly important as organisations rely more and more on search engines to deliver traffic and customers.

A Hypothetical Scenario
Assume for the moment that you’re the Marketing Director of an esteemed fish processing company called Halibut Urchin Lobster. Your primary domain name is www.halibuturchinlobster.com and has been in operation since the forward-thinking IT Director registered it in 1992, years before the company set up a web site.

Now, one of your plucky young marketing executives comes to you with a plan to change the domain name to something they promise will be more memorable: www.hulfoods.com. As you’re having a new web site built, this is the perfect time to make the change. Not only will your customers (and potential customers) find it easier to remember, they tell you, but as the word ‘foods’ appears in the domain you’ll get lots more traffic from search engines as you’ll rank better for any searches related to food.

You ponder this for a few days before taking it up to the Board Meeting. You excitedly pass on the message that changing the domain name is a good idea and it will bring you tons more interesting and exciting traffic. In short, it’ll be good for business. The Board approves the change.

So, you instruct your marketing executive, who in turn instructs the web designers or the web master to make the necessary changes. A few weeks later the web site – after a late-night proof-check  by the whole marketing team – is ready to launch. Happy that everything is in place, you give the go ahead, the old site is consigned to the code repository in the sky and the new site goes live at the new domain.

Then….Disaster Strikes!

That evening, GoogleBot visits your old domain name, follows the 301 redirect and spiders the new site. It sees a whole host of new pages, associated with a brand new domain. Instantly, your rankings fall.

When you go to Google.com that evening to show your spouse the new web site, and type in ‘HUL foods’ you get, simply, sites that are nothing to do with you. You don’t understand. You type in ‘Halibut Urchin Lobster’ (the phrase that worked this morning after all) and instead of seeing the company’s home page at the top of the SERPs, you see an old county court judgement you hoped had been forgotten about.

Enraged, the next morning you corner the executive and demand to know why on earth the web site you just spent eighty grand on doesn’t even appear in Google?!?! Cue an anxious call to the web developers, who refer you back to the advice they gave you about changing your domain three months earlier…..

And that’s the very first potential problem – you can do everything by the book, set up 301 redirects for every single page within the old site and still your web site will tumble down the rankings when you move to the new domain.

Unfortunately, it takes time and effort to resolve the problem- and it’s not all that can go wrong…

Not All Inbound Links Are Created Equal
Very often we speak to a client whose web site or domain is referred to all over the web, but who doesn’t have many in-bound links. In this kind of situation, other web sites have the domain listed on the page, but they don’t actually go the whole hog and link through.

If a visitor wants to go from that page to the next, they might copy and paste the URL into their browser, or they might do a quick search for the company name, expecting to see the company web site at the top of the list.

If, however, problems exist as I’ve described above, they won’t find you. Whilst it might sound a little silly, it’s a real problem.

Best practice would dictate that you ought to get in touch with all these people and ask them to change the link. You might not be able to do that and you’ll be left with a bunch of outdated references to your old site.

LinkedIn
More and more people are using LinkedIn these days. In fact, if you were to check, you’d see that 36 Halibut Urchin Lobster employees have a profile on the site and have a link to the company web site.

You’ll need to get them all to change the link so that it points to the new site. Some of them might not bother, some might not know what to do and some might simply be away on holiday.

Whatever the case, a bit of work is required to make the changes.

Industry Guides
If you’ve been in business for a while it’s very likely that you and your web site are mentioned in various industry guides or directories.

You’ll need to get in touch with all of these people and ask them to change the URL of your web site.

The problem here is that you might not be able to contact them all – some may not respond, some may take an age to make the change, and so on.

The net result, however, is that whilst your site is ‘invisible’ to searchers – these directory listings may not be. They’ll reinforce the old domain name and there’s a possibility they’ll contain outdated information.

PDFs on other sites
A surprisingly effective SEO method is getting links to your web site featured in PDF (or other file formats) documents on other peoples’ web sites. Perhaps you give a talk and hand over a PDF of the presentation afterwards, which the host company puts on their site. Or perhaps you produce a research paper on a new industry development and it’s featured on the industry association’s web site.

Either way, when you change your domain name, these links will become somewhat redundant. Ideally, you’d go back to people hosting the documents and give them a new version with the updated URL. Are you going to be able to find the time to do that?

Customers
Your customers probably make a point of taking a look at your web site from time to time. One route they may use to find the site is by putting your company name or your old domain name into Google.

But if they can’t find your site, if it doesn’t appear in search engine rankings, it’s hardly creating a good impression.

You also need to consider that these customers may have old bookmarks stored in their browsers, or may have emails that reference an old link. In both these cases they may well click on the link expecting to see the content, but find themselves at the home page. A sure-fire case of not managing their expectations.

Email Footers
More and more people use email footers as a means by which to promote a web site. If you have a couple of hundred people working in your company, and they send perhaps a couple of hundred emails a week – you could be looking at tens of thousands of mentions of your domain name a week.

Of course, you can change the email footer – but that would have to happen across the whole business. Does your email system support that?

Also, the reinforcement of having continually seen the old domain name may make it difficult for everyone to remember the change.

Conclusion
Our firm view is that changing your domain name is a very serious undertaking and one that should not be underestimated. Even when best-practice guidelines are followed, serious problems can occur, resulting in enormous drops in traffic and decreased visibility.

We would advise anyone considering undertaking a domain name change to think carefully about whether it’s acutally necessary and whether they have the ability, resources and time to make sure the transition is carried out in as complete and as comprehensive a way as possible.

For really succinct advice, consider the words of Tim Berners-Lee, who said in an article titled ‘Cool URLs Don’t Change‘:

What makes a cool URI?
A cool URI is one which does not change.
What sorts of URI change?
URIs don’t change: people change them.