UPDATE: Apparently Kelp isn’t suing anybody over that TV show episode. But they still suck. And I did tell you that the blog might be changing. I guess a slip into the kind of unresearched, fear-mongering shit you’d expect from the nightly local news is what I meant. Sorry guys, I usually at least skim the articles I link to.
In light of a certain TV show being sued by a certain annoying review site, who’s reps repeatedly call and harass me to sign a two year, $350 a month contract in exchange for 25 ‘guaranteed’ clicks and ‘better placement,’ I’ve posted a conversation I had with one such rep who sneak-attacked me on my cell phone after several passive-aggressive why-won’t-you-answer-me emails with the auto-fill sections badly merged.
Example: “People are looking for MARKETINGS in PORTLAND city!” That’s amazing. How many marketings do you think they’ll want to buy?
Which is really something if you think about it. These are automated emails. Dude had to get pre-outraged about my lack of response before he even pressed the button on his drip-marketing campaign app.
Names have been changed to protect me from their clear attempt to monetize via law-suit, since advertising is really not working for them.
—–
Him: I’m calling because your Kelp page is bad and you should feel bad.
Me: …
Him: You’re the only Ghost Tour in the area
Me: That’s good to know
Him: But you’re not getting the clicks you should
Me: [silently contemplating how many Kelp clicks this man thinks I should have verses how many I think I should have, which is zero]
Him: People are searching for you and they can’t find you.
Me: How many people in Portland searched for a Ghost Tour last month?
Him: 140
Me: So, I’m the only Ghost Tour in the area, and 140 people in my city were searching for a Ghost Tour and nothing came up?
Him: Well. Um…
Me: So it was just a blank search result?
Him: You came up 120 times.
Me: That sounds like good odds. [Let’s just forget those other 20 suckers and God knows what happened to them.]
Him: But you only had two bookings through our site
Me: Yeah, I wish I had no bookings through your site because you take 25% off every ticket you sell. My preference is for people to find me on Google. You’re basically a last resort for people
who can’t find my site.
Him: What about [Insert Place Name Here] Tours, have you ever heard of them?
Me: No, but the name suggests they are in a different city, whereas I am in my city. We’re not competitors. Anyway, I have to go.
—
I looked up [Insert Place Name Here] Tours, and I called the guy who runs them. We had coffee and now we’re kind of friends. So much for trying to bait me with the competition, Kelp.
I only keep a Kelp account so that when people Google me, they’ll see my name and 5 fat red stars in the search results before going past Kelp to click on my actual page. That’s all anybody should use Kelp for. That, and in the unlikely event that someone would write me a bad review, the fact that it’s my Kelp listing and not someone else’s means that I get notifications immediately so I can respond and try and work out a solution with the customer instead of letting a negative review hang there forever. Basically, the only reason I have a Kelp page is to counter-act issues that Kelp itself has created.
It’s like if Iron Man endangered the world, but then went to sleep and asked for money in order to wake up and turn over. That’s why Iron Man is a hero and Yelp oops I mean Kelp is a Reed Richards at best. Iron Man knows what he did, meanwhile everyone hates Reed Richards, but whenever they try to kill him he shoots them into space.
Kelp does everything they can to constrain business owners. They hide positive reviews from our pages, they tell us not to ask for Kelp reviews, and then they call obsessively and try to get us to pay them for a non-service that doesn’t actually increase business, but that has been known to ‘generate’ good reviews in the past. You’re not fooling anybody.