I launched Hellopeter.com seven years ago. It was the first time a site of this nature had been created anywhere in the world – brand new, unique… basically, a glorified blog site before blog sites came into being. With one huge difference: companies could Respond to Comments on the site by paying an annual subscription fee (which also includes a whole lot of other benefits).
As with any innovation, there was opposition. How can you expose complaints about my company to the public? How dare you, Peter Cheales, you’re a dead man. I’m buggered if I’m going to respond to my customers, they’re talking a load of bull (all real emails).
Then big companies cottoned on to the idea. Hang on a sec. Real world research houses charge a fortune to survey our customers and obtain feedback, much of it artificial. If this site works and gives us our feedback “straight from the horse’s mouthâ€, unsolicited at less than 1% of what real world research companies charge, can we turn it to our advantage?
Maybe we can educate our customers and everyone else with our Supplier Responses. Turn those complaints into compliments… And so began the arduous audits by companies to determine the validity of Hellopeter.com. What’s to stop a competitor from writing a damaging comment? What happens if an employee writes a favourable comment about his/her own company? What happens if there’s a blatantly untrue comment, or if it contains swearing, racist remarks etc?
Verifications, checks and balances were installed; together with swear word filters and real live editors. The site exploded and shifted from an epidemic to a pandemic. Millions of hits a month, thousands of comments a day, hundreds of subscribers, 399 on the dot!
And still the odd threat, lawyer’s letter, abusive email and crank call. That is, until I wrote my last newsletter to you (Well, well, well...), in which I cited companies that I don’t believe were playing fair: 19 threats, 7 lawyers’ letters, 53 venomous emails, and a smear campaign on various blog sites, radio shows and online dictionaries precipitating another massive surge in visitors to Hellopeter.com! On the flip side, we received thousands of notes of support from you and for that we’re truly grateful.
It transpires that the hate mails, like the lawyers’ letters and smear campaigns, were precipitated by staff within the companies I wrote about! Point being that initially the companies audited the site, now it’s the other way around.
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