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Friday, November 17, 2006

Marriott update: They’re listening

I was delighted to get an email from John Wolf, senior director of media relations for Marriott International, in response to my complaint about getting poker ads served up on web pages (including my own blog) while using the Superclick service that hotels like Marriott use to provide guests with Internet access. This occurred while I was staying at the Renaissance in downtown Toronto, both in my room and in the meeting room where I was presenting a workshop. These ads showed up despite the fact that I was paying for the service, and Ragan Communications was paying for access during the two-day session I was teaching.

John’s email first of all noted that Marriott follows my blog, which by itself puts them head and shoulders above most companies. They recognize that customers will talk about their experiences—good and bad—on their blogs. He then explained the circumstances that led to my getting those annoying ads:

Marriott’s relationship with the Internet service provider Superclick includes an agreement to exclude all popups on our high-speed service.  However, Superclick explained to us that whenever upgrades are made to the system, pop ups are automatically activated and need to be manually turned off.  Apparently, we got upgraded and were unaware of it until you notified our front desk.  At that time, we notified Superclick and the pop ups were immediately turned off.  We are talking with Superclick to ensure that they alert us about all future upgrades.

John apologized, expressing regret for the inconvenience, and assured me Marriott is taking steps to ensure there is no repeat of the experience.

If I thought companies would pay attention to blogs, I would simply articulate my complaint and wait for a reply. But you can’t make that assuption (although now I can about Marriott). I like the idea, originally broached by Christopher Carfi in response to one of my earlier posts, that companies assign every product and service a tag that customers could use when posting items about their experiences, making it easy for companies to track what customers are saying about them—and to respond.

In the meantime, Marriott is back on my “good guys” list.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #190: November 16, 2006

Content summary: Shel’s in D.C.; the anti-Walmart grassroots website; UK government launches e-petitions; the Reuters/Pluck deal; preparing for US daylight savings time changes in 2007; Casecamp Second Life; putting the public back in PR; Dan York interviews Martyn Davies; listeners’ comments discussion; PodcastCon UK 2006 in London on November 18; Luke Armour’s social media PR parody; the music; and more.

[A message from our sponsor: Online Meetings Made Easy with GoToMeeting. Try it free for 45 days - use promo code “Podcast”.]

Show notes for November 16, 2006

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 63-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Washington, DC, USA.

Download the file here (MP3, 29MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

Listen to this podcast now:

In This Edition:

• #190 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Monday November 20…

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Seatmates

The sixth and final podcast produced by the participants of the Ragan Communications ”Communicating with the Wired World” workshop—today in Toronto, Ontario, Canada—has an interviewer (Rachel Hilton from the Stratford Festival of Canada) talking to three workshopparticipants about some memorable seatmates on airplane flights. As always, the idea here to show participants how drop-dead easy it is to produce a podcast. Using a portable digital recorder, the interviewer wanders the room to do the interviews. I pull the WAV file into Audacity on my laptop, edit and add opening and closing music, save to MP3, add ID3 tags and post here. The class watches it all on the screen.

The first episode, with participants from San Francisco, dealt with where to eat in SF.
The second episode, with participants from New York, dealt with the worst job you ever had.
The third episode, with particpants from Washington, D.C., dealt with the worst boss you ever had.
The fourth episode, with participants from Chicago, Illinois, took a look at some favorite horror movies (the workshop took place on Halloween).
The fifth episode, from Atlanta, Georgia, explored some communication disasters.

The “seatmates” podcast is 1.84 MG MP3; the file runs 4:01.

Download the file.

Podsafe music used for opener and closer is “The Night Hotel” by Bohagey Bowes, from the Podsafe Music Network.

Monday, November 13, 2006

How to express contempt for your customer: Marriott provides a lesson

Note: I am cross-posting this from my travel blog. I’m pissed off enough that I want to give it as much exposure as I can.

I’m at the Renaissance Toronto Hotel Downtown, and until a few minutes ago, I was pleased with the hotel. I was upgraded due to my Marriott Rewards status to a nice split-level suite that overlooks an empty SkyDome. The food is good. The service is good. However, I am now disgusted with the hotel, and with Marriott in general. Here’s the story:

I noticed earlier that spam-like banner ads were showing up in my browser. I would navigate to a page that I knew had no ads, and one would appear anyway, mostly touting online poker. Curious, I clicked on over to my own blog, and the same ad showed up there (see image below).

I assumed I had picked up some adware. Since the laptop is new, I haven’t had a chance to install spyware/adware software, so I paid for AdAware Pro and ran it. The ads kept showing up. A little investigation determined that all these ads link to a company called Superclick. I visited their site and learned more than I wanted to, enough to get my blood boiling. Superclick provides a guest interface for hotels that includes in-room services, which is fine. But it’s also dishing up these ads. So anybody staying at a property using Superclick who visits my blog will see an ad associated with it. I would never take advertising from an online poker site, and if I did, I’d expect to get some of the revenues.

Instead, I’m paying $12.95 per day to see these ads.

That’s right; that’s what the internet connection costs.

The graphic below is from the Superclick site, listing presumably satisfied customers. Before I book a reservation at any hotel in any of these chains, I will ask if the broadband connection for which they will charge me is going to serve up any ads I don’t want to see. If the answer is yes, I’ll book elsewhere. I’ll stay at a freaking Motel 6 before I put up with this kind of crap.

Unbelievable. Talk about a lack of respect—even outright contempt—for your customer.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Manufactured or mobile? Who decides?

Kami Watson Huyse has begun a very interesting experiment I’ll be watching with keen interest. In response to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ interview in PRSA’s Tactics, Kami has followed Wales’ advice and posted suggested changes to a Wikipedia entry in its related “discussion” section.

Wales is vehemently opposed to anybody altering or adding content to Wikipedia if they have been paid to do it. He finds the practice hugely unethical, regardless of whether the contribution was truly neutral in its point of view (a requirement for all Wikipedia posts). Instead of posting directly, Wales suggests PR reps (and others representing an organization) use the discussion page to make their suggestions, then let others who agree and are not being paid make the change.

Kami, who used to work full-time for the Manufactured Housing Institute, has posted a rather detailed comment to the discussion page for the Mobile Home entry. She’s not actually asking for a change, but providing clarification around an earlier discusison about the interchangability of the words. It’ll be interesting to see if her expert advice leads to any alterations in the entry’s content.

I’ve read and heard a lot about the issue of PR practitioners and wikis—ranging from blog posts to Wales’ own arguments to an Edelman discussion on its EARshot podcast, and I still don’t know where I stand; it’s complicated. But I’m sure that there are plenty of Wikipedia entries that are not characterized by a neutral point of view and that the exclusion of people paid to manage companies’ reputations from contributing merely drives many of them underground.  Still, Wales’ approach—making your case on the discusison page—sounds reasonable. Now, thanks to Kami, we can see if it actually works.

When geeks have too much free time

Two geeks apply wiki fundamentals to their kitchen.
Video

Five percent of web visits are to social networking sites

Statistics can be twisted to mean just about anything you want them to, but this one is interesting nonetheless. In September, according to Hitwise.com, one out of every 20 visits to the web featured one of the top social networking sites as its destination. At the top of the list, it will come as no surprise to anyone, is MySpace. Results are from Hitwise’s “US Consumer Generated Media Report,” which is available free after part with some of your personal information.

That 5% of visits earned by social networking sites is nearly double the rate recorded a year earlier.

You can see a chart of the top social networking sites from MediaBuyerPlanner.com