Marketing your business in The Force Field Part 2: Sevacall responds

Last week I blogged about a recent incident in which The Force Field Forums were spammed by representative from a new web-based “lead generation” platform called Sevacall. I wrote about it for two reasons – as an effort to fight back against forum spamming, and to use this as an opportunity to explain the basics of social media marketing on the web with a real world example of its potential return on the branding of your business.

The post was titled My new approach to fighting spammers – or how to market your business in The Force Field. As part of this exercise, I publicly released an e-mail response I sent to the member from Sevacall whose one and only post in the forums started it all. There were no real expections that my post would actually enlighten the average forum spammer and curb such an annoying and unethical practice. In fact, a lot of forum spammers are really just spambots, and those who are human aren’t promoting reputable brands anyway, so chances are they don’t care what anyone thinks of them or not. They just want to leave links that will get them higher rankings in the search engines. Normally, the links are the key component in the spam post. To these spammers, it’s all about posting links to boost Google page rank on their sites. That’s all the forums are to them.

However, while this spammer did attempt to mislead the members by posting a phony “testimonial” of sorts as a satisfied customer instead of as direct representative of the company (which is who this individual really was), this individual forgot the one key thing most forum spammers are there to do – embed the forum with all the spammy links. This is what prompted me to check them out. What I found was a bona fide startup that was trying to market itself elsewhere as legit.

How could a company like this make such a huge marketing blunder? Were they really out to sabotage their reputation and destroy their brand as they built it? Or did they really not understand how to market their business to forum communities? This is why I wrote the article. It wasn’t for the spambots and the sleazy spammers marketing phony meds, pirated software and porn. It was for those companies who are legit and are trying to do it right, but don’t understand how to market to communities on the web. It is also a primer for professionals like us who want to learn how to market their IT businesses and build their brands properly.

Okay, there are other companies out there, some of them quite well established, that have made one, several or all these mistakes. Some of them never learn from them, either, as they continue to make them, despite the negative feedback from their customers. I’ve written about some of them before as prime examples of how not to market your business. Barrister Global Services, Endeavor and Geeks Mobile USA are three that immediately come to mind. Given those examples, I wasn’t really sure if I would receive a response to my e-mail message or not.

But I did.

A couple of days after I sent the e-mail, Sevacall responded. Since I posted my e-mail to them publicly, I want to be completely fair and post their response publicly as well.

 

Rick,

We are sorry to hear that your forums are getting spammed so much.  Some of our team members at Seva Call have had the pleasure of moderating an active blog/forum in the past and have also dealt with tens of thousands of spam messages.  We know it can be frustrating and from that perspective we are happy to see your blog post.

We also appreciate the level of research you conducted on our behalf before writing the blog and e-mail.  You are correct in saying that we have recently launched and also brought on 17 summer interns, most of whom have not even been here a month yet.  The post you marked as spam was, in fact, written by one of our interns, and we do apologize for that.  We should have given that particular intern more direction on how best to use forums as a marketing tool.

Although there are several lead-generation platforms in existence, we have designed Seva Call to enable real-time conversations between consumers and professionals that best match the specific request.  We allow professionals to prescreen service requests before they choose to accept or reject them.The prescreening process provides professionals with the consumer’s availability, location, and the details of the request, allowing them to make an informed decision about the quality of the lead before they spend any money.

Along with that, Seva Call’s Pay Per Conversation model makes Seva Call more cost effective than other lead-generating platforms because professionals are only charged if they have a conversation with a potential consumer about their service, as opposed to buying contact information and having to track down the consumer only to find out that they no longer need help or it isn’t really a good match.  We scratch the consumer’s itch when it happens and get a high quality professional on the phone immediately.   

As a side note, we also offer service pros a Free for Life account which allows them to get conversations at no cost.  Professionals using the Free for Life status are prioritized lower in the matching process, but there is no cost at all.

The good news about your post is that this gives us an opportunity to have a team meeting and re-visit our ethical policies and our forum marketing strategies.  We will be taking some action internally to improve our marketing processes and review intern work before it goes live.  We appreciate the opportunity to do this early in our launch cycle so that as we grow into a larger company we will have the proper processes in place.  We went from a 4-5 person team to a team of over 30 in a few short weeks.

The bad news is that most other spammers aren’t budding young start-ups that care for their reputation and will modify their internal processes and go out of their way to make sure they do things the right way.  Therefore, it is doubtful that the blog you wrote will really be an effective deterrent for future spam, but I do understand your sentiment.

Best of luck to http://www.theforcefield.net and all your members.

Thanks,
Seva Call Team
http://www.sevacall.com

 

There is a right way and a wrong way to market your business. If or when a mistake is made that could threaten your reputation and your brand, there is a right way and a wrong way to handle it. No matter what one thinks these days of web-based service platforms in general or the “lead generation” model in particular, Sevacall may earn some respect based on their response alone. I think their response deserves promotion as an excellent example of how to properly handle negative press and avoid a potential blemish on your reputation and brand.

Whether Sevacall helps or hurts the industry with their lead generation service, only time will tell. They do have one thing in their favor. They got this one right.

1 thought on “Marketing your business in The Force Field Part 2: Sevacall responds”

  1. RE: Marketing your business in The Force Field Part 2: Sevacall responds
    Wow I wasnt sure they would respond at all Rick.

    They do seem to be trying to correct things but like anything online”that remains to be seen”.

    Placing the “blame” on the intern is something one would see coming in this day and age. The lack of responsibility, corporate or personal, is saddening.

    I would have like for them to have fallen on the sword and just come out and say yep one of ours screwed the pooch and we accept the blame, how can we fix things.

    Hey at least they didnt go the lawyer route and try to strong arm.

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