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Sorry Lemi you have been terminated.

But as spammy as we all know it is to buy Facebook likes to make yourself look popular, I have to admit to being surprised by a new low 

Taken straight off Lemi's website.

we are here for you to assist on Facebook or any ip voting competition to win website or baby contest.

The internet really has found rock bottom!

Anyone else seeing a growing trend in these emails?

Dear Steve,

I contacted you by email a little while ago but didn't get a response.

<insert annoying sales pitch here>

The reason you didn't get a response was because I deleted it 

The text is pretty much the same on numerous recent emails, so I suspect it's some annoying automated spam mail sender.

LinkedIn is another which seems to be using a similar tactic. You get a new connection, with the inevitable spammy sales pitch, then a follow up telling you never responded to the first message.

Right, Tuesday morning moan over...

I know we normally concentrate on social media for marketing and business, but when you look at the hysteria generated when a "celeb" makes a comment, and twitter lights up, you do wonder what's happened to our species? Are we sliding backwards...

So Stephen Fry made a bag lady joke about costume designer Jenny Beavan during the Baftas.

Who cares?

Well half the social media world it would seem 

Fry responded to the backlash of hostile twitterers by posting a pic of himself and Beavan at an aftershow party. But this morning he decided to remove his twitter account, which is a shame as he normally is pretty funny and brightens up a normally mundane twitter feed.

Who are this army of swivel and armchair negative critics who can't resist the urge to revel in something that didn't interest them 30 seconds earlier or feel a need to follow a sheep like mentality.

It's almost like an online version of zombies, plodding along with no individual thought.

So if you are struggling to promote your business using social media, then remember to factor in the churn of the sheep user in a sea of dead and repetitive content.

Or find a way to channel this herd mentality and point in your direction with a suitably dumbed down call to action

lol I thought I was going to hurt myself laughing 

Contrary to popular myth, the customer is not always right, and on occasion is very likely to take the mick.

Good customer service is how you deal with challenging enquires and convey this into a warm cosy response, which is something I'm not very good at 

No subsidies, the scheme is funded from the Traders annual £200 fee. But there are obvious advantages and access to resources such as the Police, internal comms team etc which we wouldn't have if this was a commercial scheme.

There was a thing about this on the beeb recently. Didn't realise they weren't owned by the Government, so it's not them setting the tolls.

Monmouth MP David Davies has written to Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin, urging the UK government to set out a detailed handover plan.

The M48 Severn Bridge and M4 Second Severn Crossing are due to come back into public ownership in April 2018 once construction cost debts are repaid to Severn River Crossing (SRC) PLC.

....Government ownership should see an "immediate removal" of the 20% VATapplied to the Severn Bridge tolls, Mr Davies added, as under EU rules it would not be chargeable on a government-owned piece of infrastructure.

BBC News: Severn bridges in public ownership by 2017, says MP

So in theory the toll charges could be reduced or scrapped, though in reality it will be a good money spinner for the treasury. Be good to see the fees reduced though.

Hi Terence, very good point (and welcome aboard!)

The only way to combat it is like negative reviews and to humanely moderate. But this takes time and resource, so most sites won't bother.

A site we run for Edinburgh Trading Standards (Edinburgh Trusted Trader) has a good system, the requirement is to manually moderate every single review, positive and negative, and then when they are live (published) at least 25% have to be secondary validated, ie the reviewer is contacted to ensure comments are genuine and not coerced. You can only leave a review if you actually used one of the traders services, but consumer confidence is built knowing reviews, both positive and negative are actually screened. This also reassures traders that reviews are also genuine.

Whether this approach will be adopted by anyone else moving forward we will have to wait and see, but it's a model that does work well.

Hi Emillie, welcome aboard 

I've moved your thread as you are asking for help, and it's quite a common issue.

When you say advertised on Facebook, do you mean paid advertising (PPC) or simply posting?

I suspect it may be your approach (which a lot of people struggle with). If you look at your facebook page, what do you see? eg:

To me it look like lots of selfpromo, which will be lost in a sea of self promo time lines. Social Media is about being... social. So be sociable and interact. Be the go to Horsebox Bits resource, but do it by helping people. Did you know the best way to recondition a horsebox is by blah blah.

Here is a handy article in how you fit a new tow hitch in 30 minutes, here is a video which shows the best way to fix hinges on your horsebox ramp.

Then in your super duper content, there is a reference where you can buy the replacement parts, or ask for further help, ie your site.

So you are soft selling by engaging, that's how social media works.

It's a different way of selling, which most people get wrong and is a slow process as you establish yourself, credibility and reputation.

If you want direct and instant product sales, then get your website optimised, ranked highly and if need be, reinforce it by Google PPC which is instant and trackable marketing. But this requires budget and expertise, so is dependant on available resources.

Does that help, make sense?

Great story from the SEM Post about fake reviews and something we have seen a lot of on MLS over the years.

A divorcing couple in the USA has been ordered to pay a whooping $350,000 costs after what was proven to be false reviews about the wifes lawyer.

The reviews were proven in court to be defamatory, unfair and libellous, leaving the court to award in the lawyers favour.

The couple had left reviews on various sites, and their defence argued "reviews constituted statements of opinion and thus were protected by the First Amendment and not actionable as defamation." The court disagreed.

The full story can be seen on The SEM Post

Now this was American law, so it would be interesting to see how a UK court would have handled it, but I would suspect it would be a similar outcome.

We have seen first hand countless times on our UK and US directories fake reviews, including malicious ones such as competitor bashing by a rival business. But our ethos is professional human moderation, reinforced with spam filtering. If we are in doubt, then we investigate.

Unfortunately this approach isn't adopted by the majority of the review site industry, as anyone who has negative facebook reviews can testify to! The likes of Yelp try and address fake and spam reviews, but the question of inappropriate comments or questionable content seems to plague even the biggest review sites.

Managing reviews for Trade Associations and Trading Standards can be interesting as this can be actually be a draw for negativity. So policing reviews and keeping as fair and impartial as possible is a trick job. But with the correct process and procedures in place that protect both reviewers and reviewed, it can be done, should be done, and I wish more sites would.

Have you ever suffered from unjust or unfair reviews? Do you think the opposite and not enough negativity is published? Are you suspicious of online reviews?

Whenever I've spoken to a business owner about online marketing, it's all about Google and nothing else. To be fair they are right, we get minimal traffic from Bing, and traditionally however you market for Google works well (or even better) for Bing & Yahoo.