Plumber vs. programmer: a face-off over an online directory

Measurement is important to HelpHive, not to the plumber (who doesn't even want the service, let alone the metrics).

But what this also reminds me of is news organizations' objection to article links on aggregation sites. The difference, of course, is after you follow a link you're "there" (assuming you haven't been framed) and can bookmark it as you wish, and click on all the tasty advertisements.

If "all the plumber needs to do" is to trademark his business name to keep HiveMind from listing him (assuming HiveMind wouldn't just remove him by request), then wouldn't this also work for Rupert Murdoch and his ilk? [conscious use of the negative and inflammatory "ilk," with no small amount of satisfaction]

With Yelp, there is no option for a business to pay them $100 per month so that you can take down bad reviews of your restaurant. That's a fundamental difference. GetSatisfaction has a desire to get users writing things on their site so that the company their writing about gets over a barrel where they have to pay them "protection money" to remove bad things people complain about their service. And $100 isn't much for the ability to silence a bunch of people bad-mouthing your service.

GetSatisfaction's wording has even tried to push the point using phrasing like "X is not yet participating" and "X has not yet committed to open conversation about its products and services" (which used to be their tagline). They both try to make it sound like they've approached X and X has declined to participate. That's different from a review site where users can say what they want, but there's no claim that the place being reviewed has declined to participate.

If you allow users to post negative things about a business, fine. If you allow users to post negative things about a business and then go to that business and ask them for $100/mo to silence those negative things, not fine.

If you allow companies to participate in the conversation and say, "we have no affiliation with X" for the companies who have nothing to do with your forum, fine. If you make it sound like the company is trying to avoid your forum because they're scared of the truth, not fine.

The devil's in the details. Here, HelpHive is trying to put themselves in a position where users have their number for places of business rather than that place of business' number. In the future, there's nothing to stop them from adding ads for competitors (and offering to connect the caller to that competitor) or worse, if they're really successful and become an online directory that a lot use, holding customers for ransom.

What it comes down to is truth. GetSatisfaction is obscuring the truth by allowing companies to moderate for a price and by using misleading language about the companies who aren't paying them. HelpHive is obscuring the truth by telling customers that their number is the number of the business they want to call. People don't get uppity about Yelp or Zaggats because, while a user can post an untrue review or a reviewer might have just seen a bad night, it's a lot closer to the truth and a lot more fair. If you're getting a massive amount of bad reviews on Yelp, that's not good for you, but at least Yelp isn't coming along to extort $100 out of you to get rid of those bad reviews.

The gross exaggeration you're referring to is something that's easily overcome though by tracking total calls vs unique calls. Also you get great stats like how long the customer was on the phone for, and I imagine if they hung up or were hung up on.

Turns out many businesses want this kind of data to better improve their customer service. You would not believe how many leads are purchased, and never acted upon, just because the salespeople are lazy.

I'm not making this stuff up, tons of people use Yelp, Zaggats, GetSatisfaction, etc so obviously they're seeing value somewhere.