This is my user-experience story with Text Link Ads, relayed here not to bash the company, but to provide insight into an important aspect of company messaging. It would be fun if the Text Link Ads people showed up, and even better if they took steps to fix the problems I’m highlighting. But this isn’t a post to inspire a customer service crisis, or to demand better service.
The story starts with my redesign of this blog a couple months ago. I thought the blog looked better afterward, I thought it was presenting a better image, and I saw it was attracting better traffic. I figured, too, that it was time to put some ads up and take advantage of some of that traffic. I had heard of Text Link Ads before, and had heard good things. They’re supposedly strong in the startup community, and are doing cool new things with a tired old medium. That was important to me, so I checked them out.
When I got to the site, a lot of my excitement over the product seemed to be confirmed. There was a promotional video featuring influential bloggers I respect, telling viewers they recommend the product. The website was well-designed, with many of the backend features I expected. The messaging was good too, encouraging me to take a few simple steps to start making money on my blog, without cheapening the look or selling my soul. I had seen enough, so I signed up, started the process, and prepared myself for a positive user experience.
You can then probably imagine my disappointment a couple days later, when I received an email telling me I had been rejected for the service. The letter read:
Unfortunately, at this time we feel that your site http://www.brianlburns.com, does not meet our internal requirements to be accepted into the InLinks publishing program. We recommend that you continue marketing your website and generate a significant more amount of traffic to your site.
By itself, there’s nothing wrong with the message here. It’s perfectly reasonable for them to display their ads only on the sites they want, dependent on traffic, design, influence, or whatever else. What’s wrong here, was that this was the first time I was aware that my website was being judged for its eligibility. Nowhere in their original messaging does it indicate that a site has to meet certain requirements, and nowhere does it mention their criteria for rejection or acceptance. In other words, I didn’t know I was taking a test until I failed it. They set me up for rejection from high expectations, without giving me ample notice or time to prepare.
To me, this is a messaging FAIL. It indicates an overemphasis on the sale, where their copy promises whatever it takes to get you to the next step in the process. Their process, though, cannot uphold the promises of their copy, and thus, the process inevitably leads to a disappointing deadend at some point. When it does, neither side is well served - Text Link Ads has to spend time rejecting me when I could have otherwise self selected myself out of the process, and I go away from the interaction with a negative experience.
I believe Text Link Ads would be much better served to construct a more candid and realistic message about their selection process. I think they should promise less, and deliver more. Even if their numbers would seem to dip at first, their brand would grow better, and their longterm numbers would grow along with it.
The same goes for any such company committing the same messaging FAIL. I suggest you give up a little now to be honest, and gain a lot later from your honesty. Build your community now, and reap the rewards later.
Takeaway Question: Is your messaging accurately representing your company, or are you setting you and your customers up for inevitable disappointment? Also, are you doing everything possible to ensure your copy not only improves sales, but improves customer relationships and builds your community?
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Intense Debate commenting system - FAIL
by brianlburns on 1 January 2009
in FAIL, commenting, startups
The headline says a lot. But let me start off by writing this - I like a lot of what Intense Debate is doing… they’re a Boulder company (part of the Techstars incubator program), and as far as I’ve seen, they’re good guys. They’ve gotten some good attention, got acquired by Automattic, and even do a decent job with support (follow @mkoening to see what I mean). There’s a lot to like.
And I do want to like them. I want threaded comments to work, whether they come from Intense Debate, from their main competition, Disqus, or from someone else altogether. The point of comments in general is to use one-on-one interaction to build a community around your blog - it only makes sense to build the comment structure to reflect (and encourage) that.
However, while I want threaded comments to work, I’m seeing that the reality of an effective system for having them might be a little way off. The recent case of my blog redesign serves as good enough evidence why. Here’s the story:
I used Intense Debate here, for the 4 or so months before the recent redesign. I liked the system, I liked how it fit into my style, and I didn’t ask it to do a lot. When I redid the blog, though, I needed to some different things - I wanted a cleaner look, and I wanted the plugin to appear only on pages where comments were enabled (which seems like a valid request).
I got in touch with Michael, and though he was helpful, it became clear to me that I was on my own - I would have to do the customizations myself. With my own code. Which is fine, really… I don’t mind that too much. But I also didn’t want to spend a ton of time on it. So I decided to go with a standard system.
The problem with that, I learned, was that my comments from the last few months weren’t stored with my blog content, but in the Intense Debate system. They were gone. If I wanted them back, I had to reactivate Intense Debate, import them, then Deactivate it again. After 2 plugin upgrades and 8 hours of importing (which was still in progress at that point), I gave up. I moved on, without my comments in tow, which is why you don’t see any on any post for the last few months (which sucks).
To me, that’s an Intense Debate FAIL. I’m ok, albeit bummed, with the fact that their user interface is so inflexible. But the fact that they basically own your content, and make you go through that interface to get it back, is just silly.
Until they make the system and its workings more accessible to the average blogger (a person who is not going to spend a day custom-coding their commenting system to make sure it fits their blog design), Intense Debate is going to have problems making the jump from early adopters to universally adopted.
Maybe Disqus can do better. Or maybe, with Wordpress integration, Intense Debate can do better. Maybe it’ll be someone new. Either way though, I hope it happens.
YOUR INPUT: what do you think about threaded comments, and about the future of the companies that are pushing them? Will one emerge? What will it take for that to happen?
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