In common with many hospitality establishments around the world The Glan yr Afon Inn suffers from enemies of the business posting rude and defamatory reviews.

The main places that reviews on The Glan yr Afon Inn are published is on TripAdvisor and Booking.com.

Reviews posted on TripAdvisor are completely anonymous and anyone can post bad reviews. The sorts of people that do post reviews are typically ex staff members - chef’s and managers particularly. They disguise themselves as proper customers.

Although TripAdvisor says that it regulates reviews it does not. It is completely biased towards the public. Even though it gives the management of hospitality establishments the opportunity to respond to reviews it does not necessarily post those reviews citing that they do not conform to it’s guidelines.

Other articles have been written about TripAdvisor on this blogsite.

Reviews written about The Glan yr Afon Inn and other establishments would be fairer if the people that posted them were required to identify themselves instead of hiding behind aliases like the cowards that they are.

For another example of the damage that ex-staff can attempt to inflict on their previous employers look here

http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g186438-d1746487-Reviews-We_Three_Loggerheads-Denbighshire_North_Wales_Wales.html

Most of the reviews that have been posted here are also completely untrue.

There are thousands and thousands of businesses who are being defamed by enemies.

TripAdvisor is going to be facing legal action soon over the defamatory remarks made on it’s website. See here

http://www.techeye.net/internet/travel-and-hotel-industry-gangs-up-on-tripadvisor

As they say ” On the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog “. On TripAdvisor nobody knows if you are a real customer or a friend of an ex-staff member doing their best to cause trouble.

If you are visiting Convergence Summit North and want to discuss Hosted Voice solutions then please call onto the Azlan stand where you will find Clare Jenkins of Cisco FutureLine.

Not sure if George Clooney is going to be there but I am reliably informed that there is a Nespresso machine and coffee mugs and Clare will be happy to go for a coffee with you and discuss how Cisco Hosted Voice might be the right Hosted Voice solution for you.

Andy Brocklehurst, Cisco’s RSM for Small Business will be presenting and participating in a round table discussion and wondering around the show.

Cisco have a new Small Business website at http://www.ciscosblaunchpad.com/

You are looking for breakfast in Flintshire……..

Maybe you are driving down the A55, from Manchester to Holyhead, or you are working on one of the windfarms just off the coast ( one of the main growth industries in the Holywell area ) or you are visiting the area to see St Winefride’s Well or one of the other local attractions.

You could have breakfast in McDonalds or The Little Chef or one of the many hotels and restaurants along the A55 or you could just ” drop out ” for a while and divert just off the A55 to The Glan yr Afon Inn.

http://www.glanyrafoninn.co.uk/

Call 01352 710052 for directions if you need them.

The Glan does an all day breakfast - in a bun or on a plate.

Give them a call !!

FutureLine’s use of HubSpot Inbound Marketing Software in the U.K. has helped it to dominate visibility for UCExpo related searches and get some high quality leads from potential partners and end users.

A couple of weeks ago Cisco FutureLine increased it’s commitment to HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing software in order to be able to increase awareness of FutureLine for UCExpo 2011 and to dominate selected searches that related to UCExpo.

FutureLine was sharing the Cisco stand at UCExpo and was promoting a range of S.M.B. focussed products and services.

We started blogging a couple of weeks prior to UCExpo both here and on the FutureLine blog page.

The results have been stunning with total domination of searches like:

” cisco ucexpo 2011 ”

” hosted voice ucexpo 2011 ”

” hosted telephony ucexpo 2011 ”

and

” asterisk ucexpo 2011 ”

We also dominated the search for

” coffee ucexpo 2011 ”  !!!!!!!

Although the UCExpo show was not exactly packed out we had some great visits to both our stand at UCExpo and the website. In fact many of the leads were confirmed both through the Internet and physically by visiting the stand. This showed great commitment on behalf of the prospect.

We also got our Twitter page up and running prior to UCExpo (  @Future_Line )

and that really helped us to get up to the minute reports of what was happening at UCExpo.

Searc

The news is just out that HubSpot has raised another $32 Million in Venture Finance and I think that this will probably lead to U.K. , European and indeed Global expansion.Get the inside story from Brian Halligan of HubSpot:

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/10480/Inside-Story-Behind-HubSpot-s-32-Million-Investment-From-Salesforce-Google-and-Sequoia.aspx

Clare Jenkins, M.D. of FutureLine, is going to be one of the speakers at UCExpo 2011 and will have a simples message to deliver.

For Hosted Voice to become widely used it needs to be simples !

It also helps when it is supported by one of the biggest networking companies in the world - and Cisco Systems fits the bill perfectly.

At UCExpo 2011 the Cisco FutureLine stand ( 504 ) will show and demonstrate the latest in Cisco S.M.B. telephony options.

Actually there are two audiences for Cisco FutureLine - the end user and the reseller. Clearly the reseller knows all the technical jargon but the end user does not - especially the S.M.B. end user.

The message needs to be simples to both but between Cisco FutureLine and resellers it may be ok to use the jargon.

It’s about communicating in the right way - taking into account who your audience is.

S.M.B. customers don’t know all the answers to questions like ” What features do you need ? ” - they are typically growing, dynamic businesses who are changing structure and direction quite often.

What they do need therefore is FLEXIBILITY and UPGRADABILITY.

They want to know that they can get a phone system that does the job right now but can grow to suit the needs of thier business in the future.

SIMPLES !!

If you are the owner of a hotel, bed and breakfast, restaurant or similar hospitality venue and you are having problems with negative TripAdvisor reviews then probably the first thing to know is that you are not alone !!

Recently I was told about a lady who owned a bed and breakfast and who had a nervous breakdown after a bunch of local competitors decided to gang up on her and post loads of negative reviews on TripAdvisor.

A very common story is when a disgruntled ex-employee decides to get his or her friends to post negative reviews on TripAdvisor or simply does it themselves. After all you can be pretty well completely anonymous on TripAdvisor and it is very unlikely that each post is reviewed or acted upon by TripAdvisor as they suggest.

One of the biggest problems is that people will say things via electronic media ( email, SMS, blog posts etc ) that they would NEVER say to your face  - including ” You’re ditched ” !

Also, people who have an axe to grind will invariably make more effort to post something on TripAdvisor and similar sites than those people who are happy with the food or service they received. In fact there is a view that reviews are typically polarised to the extremes of those that are either VERY happy or VERY unhappy.

Surely people should not be allowed to post fraudulent or defamatory comments ????

What does TripAdvisor itself say about Fraud on it’s website ????

http://www.tripadvisor.com/help/what_is_considered_fraud

What is considered fraud?

Reviews of accommodations, attractions and restaurants should only be written by TripAdvisor members that have had a customer service experience that they want to share with the community.

The following actions may be considered fraudulent:

- Attempts by an owner (or agents working on behalf of the ownership of a property) to boost the reputation of a property by:

• Writing a review for their own property
• Asking friends or relatives to write positive reviews
• Submitting a review on behalf of a guest
• Copying comment cards and submitting them as reviews
• Pressuring a TripAdvisor member to remove a negative review
• Offering incentives such as discounts, upgrades, or any special treatment in exchange for reviews
• Hiring an optimization company, third party marketing organization, or anyone to submit false reviews
• Impersonating a competitor or a guest in any way

- Attempting to damage his/her competitors by submitting a negative review.

Bottom line: Any attempt to mislead, influence or impersonate a traveler is considered fraudulent and will be subject to penalty.

What you will notice is that this is all VERY biased towards stopping owners of hospitality venues from promoting themselves and virtually ignores individuals ( ” customers ” ) posting fraudulent or defamatory comments.

So, in these challenging economic times with everyone trying to get ” the best deal ” or ” a discount ” Tripadvisor is a ” deal getter” or ” discount merchants ” dream !

Want to ruin your ex-employers business ??? Just get all your friends to post bad reviews !

Want a discount ? ? Threaten the owners with a bad post on TripAdvisor unless they give you one !

What CAN you do as an owner of a targeted hospitality venue ??

As this post suggests you can ask TripAdvisor nicely to remove what you believe is a fraudulent review:

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Remove-a-Fake-Negative-Comment-From-TripAdvisor

You could also, as the owner of the targeted venue, respond to the negative review posted on TripAdvisor. This may or may not be published depending on whether TripAdvisor decides to allow your response or not. If you do post responses then you need to be in the right ( cool ) frame of mind to do so and may need professional ( Reputation Advisor or PR person ) help.

You could do one of the things that TripAdvisor tells you is fraudulent e.g. Get some of your friends to post positive reviews to counteract the negative and fraudulent reviews. Obviously I am NOT telling you to do this !

You could also establish a blog ( alongside your website ) that is optimised for /orientated around being found for Google searches on e.g. ” Reviews of Your Hotel “. Search Engine Optimising ( SEO’g ) and blogging are skills/experience that you may not have but there is information about this on this blogsite and if you still need help please contact me.

I will also add links to helpful web and blog sites as I come across them - below.

In the U.K. if defamatory information is posted on a U.K. web or blogsite you can write to them and ask them to remove that defamatory information. If they do not then they become liable themselves to a legal action for defaming you.

Unfortunately e.g. U.S. based websites are not liable in the same way.

However websites like eBay and PayPal have adopted new ways of resolving criticism’s of sellers and buyers in recent times including those situations where someone is defaming someone else.  Issues are resolved using ” Online Dispute Resolution ” and ” Community Courts ” ( Courts comprised of peers ) .

I recently witnessed the eBay Online Dispute Resolution making a decision about an eBay sale and purchase dispute. From what I could see the ” Community Court ” reviewed the information and communications that had occurred and then made a final and binding decision.

There are a number of legal representations being made to TripAdvisor at the moment on behalf of some very large hospitality businesses and the objective of these legal challenges is to be able to do something about defamatory reviews being posted fraudulently.

It is not clear what the outcome of these legal challenges will be but there is a view that TripAdvisors whole business model is at risk if it does not do something about this issue.

The reason that I recommend that my clients use HubSpot Inbound Marketing software is because I want them to be in control of thier Internet Marketing spend and investment.

When researching for this article I quite liked this post here

http://www.wsiwebpro.com/roi-formula-internet-marketing.html

which offered a ” Common Sense ROI strategy ” which basically was ” Increase the traffic to your website OR increase the conversion of traffic to leads OR both “.

Within that simple advice are hidden some basic things that some people just do not understand.

As I have said in earlier blogs the key to a website is how often it is found by the right people ( for the product or service that you are supplying ) and it is of lesser importance what it looks like as long as it converts visitors to leads well.

As very few Internet Marketing and Website Design companies understand this very few of them ask a critical question ” What ( words and phrases ) are you trying to be found for and who are your likely customers??  ”

In fairness those that do often struggle to get a response because thier clients simply do not know the answers to these questions. ( The answer to the first part of the question requires that the client put himself in the mind of thier client and think what they would type into Google in order to find the product or service that they provide . The answer to the second part of the question requires that they understand the typical profile of thier target customer. )

When you have your website being found by lots of the right people then you have TRAFFIC !! The you only need to convert that traffic to a lead. ( To be a lead you need some information about the enquirer e.g. name and email address. )

Conversion of traffic into leads is an art that I will not go into here.

The reason that I recommend HubSpot Inbound Marketing software to my clients is that I want to know ( and they need to know ) how much traffic they have; how it is increasing ( hopefully ! ) over time and where that traffic is coming from.

Is it coming from e.g.

- Direct Traffic ( someone just typed in the name of your company - implying that your name is well known for that type of product or service )

- Organic Traffic ( implying that you ARE being found for the words and phrases that you have optimised for )

- email traffic ( implying that you are getting people signing up to your blog/website and your email camapigns are working )

- Referrals ( implying that other people are spotting and highlighting and propagating your information )

- Social Media ( implying that people are following your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin pages and that they are following these back to your blog/website ).

etc etc

Once we know what is happening to our traffic and where it is coming from we can fine tune to get more and then to convert that traffic into leads and then, all importantly, into sales.

Once we know how many of what product or service we sold ( at what price and profit ) we can work out what our Return on Internet Marketing spend is.

If you are going to UC Expo 2011 and looking for SMB products and solutions then I recommend that you visit the Cisco Stand ( Stand 504 ) and also visit the Small Business Communications Theatre

http://www.ucexpo.co.uk/Seminars/Small-Business-Communications

to hear presentations from Andy Brocklehurst

http://www.ucexpo.co.uk/Seminars/Small-Business-Communications/Tuesday-08-March-2011/Breaking-Down-the-Physical-boundaries-between-businesses

of Cisco and also Clare Jenkins of FutureLine

http://www.ucexpo.co.uk/Seminars/Small-Business-Communications/Wednesday-09-March-2011/Simplifying-VoIP-the-key-to-wide-spread-adoption-is-simplicity

FutureLine is a Hosted Voice system being provided in conjunction with Cisco. Andy says:

“We are seeing an increasing demand for managed and hosted solutions in the voice space and this is especially the case for smaller businesses with less than 20 employees. FutureLine have a refreshingly new approach by addressing the key fundamentals of quality, security and ease of use and deployment. This is all underpinned by partnering with Cisco who fully understand how to manage different media provided by the various consumption models.”

Andy Brocklehurst
RSM Cisco Small Business

Cisco’s theme for the SMB products and solutions aspect of the UC Expo stand will be that Cisco SMB products can be purchased for less than the price of a cup of coffee and that Cisco’s 0% financing goes a long way toward achieving this.

There will be some exciting new Cisco product launches and appearances at UC Expo 2011 including the new UC 320 SMB telephony system.

Visitors to the Cisco stand will be offered the chance to win a fabulous coffee making machine.

The Cisco FutureLine Hosted Voice system is based on Digium Asterisk at the core and uses Cisco Systems networking and endpoint ( voip phones, video over ip equipment etc etc ) hardware.

Whilst some people might view Cisco and Digium as unlikely partners I believe that they represent one of the most powerful combinations in the telephony world.

I regard Digium and Asterisk respectively as a company and a solution whose time has come. I am not alone in this view. If you doubt my opinion then perhaps you may consider the involvement of David Skok of Matrix Partners

http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/team_detail/david_skok/

in Digium. He is one of the investors.

David is specifically focused on the areas of cloud computing, Open Source, Software as a Service (SaaS), marketing automation, virtualization, storage, and data center automation.

Consider also the references in the book ” Asterisk: the future of telephony ” :

” In the book ” Paradigm Shift ” Tim O’Reilly talks about a paradigm shift that is occurring in the way technology ( both hardware and software ) is delivered. O’Reilly identifies three trends:

- the commoditisation of software

- network enabled collaboration

- software customisability ( software as a service - SaaS )

These three concepts provide evidence to suggest that open source technology is an idea whose time has come. ”

In this blog here

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2011/02/19/digium-asterisk-based-futureline-at-uc-expo-2011/

I have highlighted a number of general benefits of  a Digium Asterisk based Hosted Voice platform. ( These benefits also apply to premises based or managed solutions ).

In the same way that a Digium Asterisk based pbx like the Switchvox can be compared favourably to other premises based alternatives e.g. Avaya/Nortel or Panasonic a Digium Asterisk based Hosted Voice solution can be compared favourably to other proprietary Hosted Voice solutions e.g. Broadsoft or Mitel.

Without going through all the general benefits highlighted in my earlier blog it is reasonable to assume that the advantages are scaled up in line with the scaling of the system from one that serves a single customer to one that serves multiple customers.

If you are a reseller, distributer or small telco or cloud services company looking to provide Hosted Voice services to your customers ( and perhaps the customers of your customers ) then you are going to be looking at an investment in the order of £100’s of thousands ( albeit financed over a period of time ) in order to acquire a proprietary Hosted solution from e.g. Broadsoft or Mitel.

I highlight proprietary solution because it seems to me that the very last thing you want to do is to spend £100’s of thousands on a solution that is not “open”, standards based, easily upgradeable, customisable and flexible.

For an in depth appreciation of the problem being faced we can turn to David Skok again and a series of posts such as

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-economics-1/

David starts:

” This post provides SaaS entrepreneurs with an Excel spreadsheet model and graphs that show the cash flow trough that happens to SaaS, or other subscription/recurring revenue businesses that use a sales organization. These kinds of SaaS businesses face a cash flow problem in the early days, because they have to invest up front in sales and marketing expenses to acquire customers, and only get payments from those customers over a delayed period of time. I refer to this phenomenon as the the SaaS Cash Flow Trough. ”

The cash flow problem in the early days is only going to be worse if you have to spend £100’s of thousands on your Hosted Voice platform !!

So, for many reasons, even though there have been successful models around the world based on proprietary Hosted Voice systems - I think there are a lot of failures in the Hosted Voice world based on such platforms - I believe that an investment in a Digium Asterisk based platform is going to help a Hosted Voice business model massively ( because it is going to be far less up front cost, more scalable, upgradeable etc etc ).

Evidently, if you are going to be supplying a total voice solution to a customer, you are going to need things like networking hardware ( routers, firewalls etc ), end points ( phones, video cameras etc ), possibly storage solutions, virtualisation hardware and software, broadband, SIP trunks etc etc

Who better to partner with than Cisco ??

As I have mentioned before there are millions of Cisco endpoints and routers attached to Digium Asterisk systems - particularly systems that have been supplied to small and medium sized businesses.

A quick review of  established and experienced Digium Asterisk value added resellers proves that they typically have Cisco and Microsoft skills and accreditations aswell as Digium Asterisk. They have to have really - don’t they !

Clearly Cisco have products and services that compete with Digium Asterisk products and services.

However Cisco also partner with e.g. Broadsoft and it could easily be argued that Broadsoft based solutions are preventing sales of e.g. Cisco UC 500 systems.

In the S.M.B. space particularly ( and here I mean S.M.B. end user customers and S.M.B. resellers, distributers and telco’s ) I believe the combination of Cisco and Asterisk is unbeatable and this is the combination that FutureLine provides.