It went from “thinking about” to “definitely” which is good to hear.

No worries. I’m actually quite grateful to the post because it cleared up some of the internal debates we were having and led to a number of changes that I think will be quite beneficial for all.

Sorry I didn’t get a chance to respond to this post earlier. With all the discussions taking place and actual work that needs to be done, there are just not enough hours in the day – that’s why I’m posting at night now :)

Boris

Thank you for your feedback!

@Debra – just to clarify… the first thing I mentioned in my email to you was the fact that we’re considering adding in the near future the ability for SEM firms to respond to the reviews and present their side of the story. Isn’t that what I wrote to Nick, as well?

There were a few other things that I mentioned in the email, but our stance of this functionality did not change.

I just submitted a response on Sphinn regarding this feature (and a few others). Since it’s getting a bit late, I’ll just include a link here. If you have any more questions or concerns, I would be more than happy to address them:

http://sphinn.com/story/37550#c37835

Best!
Boris

@ Debra – hmmm, interesting that you had a different response from Boris. Maybe the vendor commenting is something they have only just come around to? But even if they do integrate vendor feedback, it just becomes a “he said, she said” issue and flaming is likely to ensue. Re clients with a grudge – I had the same thoughts. We too have had payment deadbeats (love that term!) break our contract and then bad mouth us for ceasing the contracted services. UGH

What would be really useful, to both agencies and their clients, is some sort of SEM benchmarking service. I’m not sure how granular this could get, but let’s say I have a client offering a high value / high price strategic enterprise service; not the best fit for a search campaign, but they’d like to try it. What sort of results (click-throughs and conversions) should they expect? What level of results should I expect to achieve for them?

Or this: a client is considering different types of incentive for response, perhaps a white paper, free trial and webinar registration. A webinar registration form is likely to convert at a lower rate than a white paper download, but how much lower?

That type of data would be far more helpful to both buyers and providers in the SEM space than a review site that is unlikely to provide anyone with truly useful information.

And Boris from SEM responded with: “@NickWilson – providing the companies with an ability to respond to comments is definitely something that we plan on integrating in the near future. It’s been on our agenda since the beginning, but it will just take a bit of time to get that developed.”

I got the same email you did and responded with the exact same concern that NickW said above.
But…my response from Boris was quite different so I’m glad to see they’ve taken the issue of SEO’s being able to respond to negative comments into consideration and plan to implement it.

Unhappy clients become unhappy for a lot of reasons and not always because they were “wronged”. There’s two sides to all stories and more times than not issues we have with clients are a result of things they’ve not done. I’ve even had one bounce checks and become irate when we stop services. Now I ask – if he left a comment do you really think he’s going to tell people we stopped working on his site because he’s a payment deadbeat?

Last point – while I’m sure the people at SEM will do what they can to monitor email addresses, that’s all done electronically. Meaning – they can’t read and review every single comment that comes in so there are going to be comments that make it by their review system.

They’ll be posted and then what?