Tagged with internet

Condiments 2.0

“Ketchup is a simple and gorgeous web app for sharing meeting notes, ideal for home businesses that can’t boast a secretary. It’s free for a limited amount of time”

How useful, I thought. A free web based application that could be applied in the workplace and increase the integration of everything ever with the web. The review appeared on the Enterprise Nation website, a useful resource for home based businesses.

My interest in clicking through to the Ketchup website itself was sufficiently piqued thanks to the explanation of the simplicity of using the app, that and the name is a conversation starter in itself.

Keeping track of meetings, who said what and when that very ‘what’ was to be done by can be an infuriating consequence of meeting notes that dont make sense two hours after the conclusion.

A name like Ketchup for a professional business application already suggests a tongue-in-cheek attitude resides behind the branding but if you have the misfortune to land on their website using Internet Explorer you are in for a surprise.

OK, the message is a touch cheeky and other good web browsers are available but not only is the door shut to you as a potential user, the almost holier-than-thou-message you get is internet snobbery at its worst. Sure, IE has its foibles and I have a loyalty to Chrome for personal usage but why not cater for a further 37%, especially when there is evidence of the application changing to a paid for version in the future.

Just in case I thought it was just me suffering a momentary lapse or a complete funnybonectomy and getting uptight, I consulted my Twitter following and got the following reasoned responses:

As a Mac user, I sometimes find sites I can’t access at all. My thoughts aren’t printable. Let’s just say I go elsewhere

@EmilyCagle

If you’re using IE, you deserve everything that’s coming to you. might be doing yourself out of a lot of traffic tho.

@Crablin

I’d be grumpy and wouldn’t go back, unless I got that message regularly from lots of sites due to using an ancient browser.

@Katkni

What do you think? If a website was condescending about the browser you were using and didnt let you use their site…what would you think?

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The blog is mightier than the sword

Blogging Pictures, Images and Photos

In the old days a quibble over a product or service not being up to scratch would be resolved through an exchange of letters with a customer service department. A swift resolution ensuing, the customer would be happy and the business might have gone beyond just saving face and reinforced its brand values, too. Today, this model is not quite so strong.

According to Webuser.co.uk, a holidaymaker has secured £600 in compensation for a disastrous holiday as a result of the prominent Google search ranking he achieved for the angry blog he fired off when a complaint letter to the holiday firm yielded no result.

The holidaymaker had originally penned a letter of complaint (ten pages of letter, in fact) detailing a depressing series of problems he encountered during a less than satisfactory Tunisian holiday. After six weeks, having only received an acknowledgement for his rant, the increasingly angry traveller went public and recorded his troubles on his personal blog.

In no time, he was getting lots of traffic – much of it from people who had simply typed search terms relating to holidays in Tunisia. In fact, the critical blog entry’s Google ranking was creeping ever closer to the summit on all the key search terms the travel company would rather see taking you to the holiday package they were trying to flog.

Once the holiday company became aware of the growing popularity of the blog post, blogs about the blog post and probably even blogs blogging about the impact of blog posts about the original blog post – such is the way the Internet feeds off itself – it became apparent that an “elevated” level of response was required. Compensation was paid to the blogger and an apology posted on his blog, to boot.

However, it may be too late for damage limitation – the rant, of course, has been widely seen and still exists in the public domain. The digital footprint of a blog post that would never have seen the light of day had the travel company responded sooner is now leaving the most indelible – and embarrassing – of stains on its reputation

Originally published by Marketing Donut in my guise as a blogger for small businesses looking to get the most from their marketing.

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