http://206.106.174.250/blog/blog_comment.asp?bi=1385

John, same thing happened at the Peter Krasilovsky's Kelsey Group blog. (see link above) But he thinks it is a smear campaign . . . who knows.

Funny thing about google, I bet Google get 2x more "type in" traffic than the next highest website. Its nice to be at the top of the food chain (or click stream chain).

BTW its a common eBay phishing scam for scammer to email random people (using eBay's member communication template) and claim that they are about to file a negative feedback. With out thinking, the person recieving the template will click "reply to member" in the email and get sent to a scammer site. The ohishing site will look like the eBay site and since the person is eager to defend his feedback, he will quickly enter his username and password without checking the URL. After that, the phisher would try to use the username and password he harvested to get money through the person's paypal account (hoping that the username/password/email is the same)

• Posted by: will
• September 27, 2006 7:41 PM

Hi John:

We address the issues in some of the comments on your blog below. What’s more interesting than our little company’s issue is what you point out about search in your post. The pile on effect is really interesting. It is also interesting how were able to get an enormous amount of feedback from people so quickly because of the open communication on the web.

We are looking to help merchants and search allowed us to know we had an issue quickly so we could work it. It really does provide a lot of value to a small company like us. Of course, some of it as has been pointed out by others might be the classic web echo, but regardless it is interesting. The content below can be found on our site with links at the URL above.

MerchantCircle is focused on delivering services to enable local businesses to find more clients. As part of this service, we provide a web page for each merchant as well as tools that merchants can use to get the word out about their business (blogs, coupons, newsletters). The free MerchantCircle service is (as the name indicates) free and is being used by over 50,000 merchants currently.

Merchants can receive ratings and/or reviews on their MerchantCircle listing. In the past, some merchants have raised concerns about not finding out their listing was available and more importantly that a consumer had posted information on that listing. We have been experimenting with many different methods of informing merchants when their listing changes. For example, when a listing is claimed, we notify the merchant via multiple methods to confirm identity. Some of these methods involve pro-actively contacting merchants who may not visit the site regularly or are unaware of the listing. These efforts have been made to try and manage a merchant concern.

As you can imagine, this required some investment and some effort. In fact, for a while the entire team of 9 personally contacted local merchants. Anyone who was worked with lots of users can probably guess that this approach does not work when rapid growth occurs. Some of the experiments seem to be having unintended consequences and had some execution issues. We are working to address those issues while continuing to deliver value to merchants.

In addition to our efforts to keep you informed, our system allows users to invite local merchants to join their network, or MerchantCircle. The growth in merchants has resulted in a large number of invites on the system over the past few weeks as merchants figure out that adding to their network will increase the ability of local customers to find their listing. We have received some concerns about this and are working to improve the situation.

Merchants have complete control over their information on MerchantCircle. If anyone would like their listing to be removed from MerchantCircle please email remove@merchantcircle.com and include your business name and phone # and we will remove your listing from the site and your contact information from our system within the day.

If you would like to use MerchantCircle to help grow your business, we look forward to working with you to continue to improve our ability to bring you local customers.

Ben

• Posted by: Ben
• September 27, 2006 8:32 PM

Hmmmm... Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't seem that Ben's advertisement above doesn't address the fact that he used a war-dialer to spread false information hoping to build interest in his "service".

• Posted by: Brian Combs
• September 28, 2006 3:16 PM

Fast-forward 4 months... things must be slow at merchantcircle.com...
we got the prerecorded call today saying we got googled and we received a positive rating.

There are, of course, no such ratings at merchantcircle.com.

I'm not against networking businesses, and I'm aware that MerchantCircle will remove listings upon request. Nonetheless, unsolicited pre-recorded phone calls containing false/mis-leading information isn't the way to grow a business nor build a positive reputation.

I echo Brian's comment posted above.

• Posted by: NewHorizon
• January 16, 2007 2:17 PM

Why does the sudden influx of comments make it a smear campaign? The whole point would be that there is a negative backlash of people who got phone spammed all around the same time (automation!) and who then googled the company to find out more about it and stumbled across your blog(going to a third-party source to check legitimacy and not "rewarding" a potential spammer by increasing traffic to their site). In what way is this company a LEGITIMATE business? I personally will mention their tactics to as many people as I can - as an example of how not to do it...

• Posted by: Julia
• January 23, 2007 10:50 AM

After being harassed several times in 2 days by Merchant Circle's robot phone calls to my home phone that is on the Federal Do Not Call List, leaving messages about the supposed ratings that a Google user left about my business (which of course are fake), I've had it. Plus finding their fake blog purporting to be my business on Merchant Circle, which I didn't write. And their generated Google search result supposedly for my business that says "Get a coupon for (my business name)" that deceptively tricks people into logging into Merchant Circle, only to find a phone listing suggesting the surfer call the business to get a coupon (that doesn't really exit) I've had it. I just filed an FTC complaint for Merchant Circle's deceptive practices. Tomorrow I'm driving to the state capitol to talk to the my attorney general's office. Someone has to stop this maddness. No wonder Merchant Circle's Google ranking and web traffic have gone up incredibly in a month. They are tricking both business owners and Google searchers into driving their web page views to the moon. Worse, Google is supplying ads to these folks. If I were Google, I'd drop Merchant Circle quickly before they are fined. Hopefully, Google has more morals than Merchant Circle, who seems intent on angering everyone with their tricky marketing schemes.

• Posted by: Jonathan
• January 25, 2007 5:32 PM

I received a call last night after working hours from Merchant Circle with a recorded message saying that a customer left negative feedback. This is impossible because we do not yet have customers. So I “googled” and sure enough, though Merchant Circle may be a legitimate business and have a good idea, there methods do not look very ethical. So I checked the site to see what was really on there about us. NOTHING! Not a single rating or anything, just the company name (which is incorrect) , address, and phone number; nothing one could not get out of the yellow pages. Spamming my voice mail to try and get my business. Sorry, I do not work with businesses like that.

• Posted by: Allan
• March 6, 2007 6:07 AM

Merchant Circle just tried to scam me for the first time today. I did not fall for it and quickly found the many blogs exposing Merchant Circle for the scum that they are. Don't waste your time responding to Merchant Circle. Do take the time to add your comments and continue to expose Merchant Circle for the riff-raff that they are!

• Posted by: Steve
• March 6, 2007 2:26 PM

As with others who have posted, I just received my first solicitation from MerchantCircle, informing me of "negative opinions" from customers. This was sent to a number on the "no call" list. I can't believe anyone would sign up after being on the receiving end of such an inept marketing approach.

Mark

• Posted by: Mark Selleck
• March 7, 2007 11:32 AM

Thank You for having a blog exposing Merchants Circle.

I believe I just received an unsolisited prerecorded phone call that was a lame attempt to get my company to sign up for there services. They stated that my company R&D; Communications had been given bad customer satisfaction reviews and I could see them by going to merchantscircle.com. Once on their site you have to sign up to see your review.

I don't take kindly to punks that resort to misinformation, intemidation or extortion. If they think they can be successful over the phone they have a poor business plan. Those tactics work much better up close and personal. They should have some of their fellow gang members stop by Elburn, Illinois and see if the can scare me into joining up. I'll be waiting.

• Posted by: Fred Gaebler
• March 8, 2007 2:56 PM

Today I got a phone call from these guys, I got nervous and called the toll free number right back, the name merchants circle didn't even come up in the recorded message. This is a crime and the website should be shut down, there is a much better way to make money then to scam people.

• Posted by: dan
• March 12, 2007 7:08 PM

I wish to thank whoever is responsable for this site which has informed me of the background of Merchant Circle as I too have received an automated call from them stating that someone had posted a positive listing for my business. I have received similar notices of Angies List and they have actively solicited me to join their organization. Although I believe Angies List to be ligitimate I am courious as to why the company has been so percistant in soliciting.

• Posted by: don sterling
• June 6, 2007 12:40 PM