Reviews are not uncommon on JoeTech.com and some reviews I get paid for. This is the story how a company called FutureMedia Studio is intent on making sure they don’t honor their business agreements.
For the uninitiated, here’s how paid reviews generally work: A company (or an agent company) contacts the blog about a paid review. A price is agreed upon and money is paid to the blog (or agent company). Then the review is completed and published. I make a point to personally use or try anything I review, whenever possible, in order to provide a complete and honest opinion based on actual experience. This takes a lot of time but is a necessary part of the process.
What I Get Paid For
One common misconception is that “paid” means “positive”. There may be a couple blogs that will guarantee a positive review, but I guarantee an honest opinion. When I provide a paid review, the payment is for my time and honest opinion. This was the case when I provided a generally positive Infinity Control iPhone game review as well as my even more lucrative Boost Mobile review, in which I devoted half the review to relaying my horrendous activation experience.
Bad Business With FutureMedia Studio
Historically, I’ve done well with a review agent company called IZEA and their review service, Social Spark, which has pioneered the paid review process. Now and then, companies skip the middle man and come directly to me for a review. Recently, I was emailed by a new company called Review Roster that brokers reviews for Android and IOS apps and decided to try the service out.
My first review opportunity with Review Roster was FutureMedia Studio’s iPhone and iPad app, Perfect Reader. I provided the review as agreed (seen here) and waited for payment. As a new paid review business, Review Roster had not been collecting payment before reviews were completed. I discovered this after they informed me that my payment was delayed due to trouble getting payment from FutureMedia Studio. Review Roster now collects payment in advance. What struck me as odd was that the app got some great remarks from me, so it couldn’t be that they were unhappy with the tone of the review (although that shouldn’t matter). As it turns out, it seems FutureMedia Studio just didn’t want to pay.
I keep pretty busy, so I set the experience aside, got assurance that payment for future reviews would be pre-collected, and provided two subsequent reviews for Review Roster. I was paid for these second and third reviews without much concern and it wasn’t until recently that I thought again about the Prefect Reader review while reviewing traffic logs. I decided to throw out a tweet to FMS and RR and see if I could provoke a resolution to the problem. Here’s what my tweet read:
Still curious why @perfectreader never paid for the @reviewroster review I completed. #badbusiness
Keep in mind, this is after several emails with Review Roster months before to resolve the issue quietly. Sometimes you need a megaphone to get a company’s attention. This was clearly the case with FutureMedia Studio as they replied a couple days later with the following:
Someone at Review Roster contacted Tim at FutureMedia Studio and eventually got a response that was emailed to me a couple days ago. After reading the response, I knew immediately that I would turn down the proposed resolution to my complaint, but I decided to think it over before I responded. Essentially, RR forwarded the offer Tim made:
“I’m ok to pay that invoice as it comes from our team member. but could you please ask JoeTech to remove the old review as I really don’t need it. In exchange, I’d like JoeTech to review our popular book – MS Office 2010 Professional Handbook…Otherwise, I am not paying.”
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. FutureMedia Studio acknowledges that they agreed to pay for a service that was provided, refuses to pay, and now wants me to just delete my hard work and do another review just to get paid for the first one. I replied via email with a resounding NO, of course, adding that the offer is just insulting. Holding payment for a provided service ransom to squeeze additional work out of me is bad business.
What do you think?
Am I wrong? Do you agree with me? Would you be insulted by this response? Chime in and let this company know what you think about how they conduct business.
NOTE: While Review Roster stumbled a little at first, they’ve always had great communication and worked with me to resolve this.
UPDATE 07.28.2011: This morning, I’ve been informed that payment was made for my work and that Tim fired the guy who originally initiated the work. This is a horrible outcome, in my opinion. It’s great that the payment was eventually made, but I was far past expecting the payment and and to fire someone else for the negative press Tim caused is wrong. If you’re the guy who got fired or if you want to hire the guy, email me at joe@joetech.com. Maybe I can help.
It’s that time of year again. The BlogWorld Expo has once again come and gone, and once again, it was a rewarding experience.
Last year, Michelle and I found ourselves in the presence of some of the top bloggers at a dinner thrown by Market Leverage. Unfortunately, we were unable to make it to the dinner this year as we had so much going on. In fact, we missed out on a few things, but the weekend was still productive and a lot of fun.
Thursday night, we attended the TechSet party at The Bank night club in the Bellagio hotel. Budweiser sponsored free beers for a while, which was nice because the drinks were expensive. After a couple hours, the club kicked us all off the tables to open up table service, which cost anywhere from $750 up to $25,000, so we bailed. Before we left, however, we got up and danced (which I almost never do), and I was able to surprise NikNik and Reggie from MyTechOpinion.com. I guess I didn’t tell NikNik I was able to make it out after all, because the look on her face was priceless. Sadly, I didn’t really get a minute to stop and chat with them after that.
Friday morning, Michelle and I met Krystyl on the way into breakfast. She’s a social queen who I meant to meet last year and never did. I also met Brett Bumeter from Softduit Media on the way from the Hilton to the conference and enjoyed our chats on the walk over and at the exhibitors hall. I got to see online business consultant, Jim Kukral again and finally got to meet Drew from BenSpark.com. I spent some time running around the hall, engaging in discussion with the various vendors, and I started by finally meeting Ashley Edwards from IZEA. There were several companies that I became familiar with last year and some new stuff, but there were really just a couple things I found exiting that were actually new to me.
After a little relaxing back at the hotel, Michelle and I headed to an early anniversary dinner at the Benihana Japanese steakhouse in the Hilton. It’s a bit pricey for a steak dinner, but the quality of the food was comparable to what I’d find here for the same $50/plate or so. The real reason we went was for the experience. You sit at a table with 5 or 6 strangers and the chef prepares the food in front of you. The chefs do a good job of entertaining the whole time, too. It’s half cooking and half juggling. After dinner, we headed to see the Cirque du Soleil show, KÀ, which was just amazing. The tickets were given to me in order for me to provide an honest review of it, but it will cost me because now Michelle and I are eager to go back and see the other shows.
Saturday, I headed back over to see the opening keynote, which was a celebrity-filled panel on how celebs use Twitter, essentially. It included Anthony Edwards (ER, Revenge of the Nerds), Jermaine Dupri (music mogul), Robin Antin (Pussycat Dolls), and Matt Goss (who I hadn’t heard of). Planned but cancelled was Soleil Moon Frye (Punky Brewster) and the panel was moderated pretty well by Brian Solis. Jermaine Dupri came off as a jerk, but a lot of what he said made sense, too. I think it was just how he came across as if he were the only one who mattered that bugged me. Anthony Edwards was full of analogies and was really polite and had some important points, too, as did Matt Goss. Robin Antin didn’t seem to bring much original perspective or anything really thought-provoking to the conversation. There were some differing opinions on exactly how much you should be sharing on Twitter and on how much you should really interact with fans. In all, though, it gave me some things to think about and it changed my idea of celebrity tweeters a little. It made me feel a little more open to trying to connect with someone regardless of their celebrity status. Anthony Edwards also took a moment to send out his very first Tweet in front of us, which I thought was pretty cool.
After the keynote, I saw John Chow for the first time of the weekend, so I walked over to say hello and he noticed that the IZEA booth was empty, so we decided to take it over. I swear John Chow has all the good off-the-cuff ideas. Last year, he had a contest to give away MarketLeverage’s money and I joined in. This year, taking over IZEA was a blast and I think we did a good job, too. A little confusion about when Ashley and Ted Murphy (IZEA CEO) were supposed to be there led to a test of how much John and I knew about IZEA and its Social Spark, SponsoredTweets, and Sponzai. Eventually, a stunned (but laughing) Ashley and Ted showed up and I got to meet Ted for the first time. There was so much interest in the IZEA booth at the time (mostly from John stealing people from other booths) that even after Ted and Ashley showed up, John and I continued to field questions to help with all the overflow. What antics will John and I get into next year, I wonder.
Saturday evening was reserved for a visit with Amy, a friend of Michelle’s that she hadn’t seen in years. She and her husband, Greg, have been living in Las Vegas, so we headed over and had a good visit with them and then headed home Sunday.
If you’re a blogger and serious about it at all, you need to be at BlogWorld. If not for all the sessions, you need to go just to connect in person with people who you’ve been interfacing with online and meet new people. I was pleased to finally meet several people I’d wanted to meed for a long time and enjoyed meeting lots of new people who I hope to continue to connect with online. Next year, I think I’ll plan for all the sessions again. I skipped them this year and although I probably wouldn’t have made it to many of them due to time constraints this year, I still feel like I missed out on some valuable information and interaction. For those who didn’t go, be sure to next year and find me and say hello.
PayPerPost is dropping a little cash on me for a paid review and they expressed that they want it to be honest, which is good because I’ve got some good things and some bad things to say about their new v4.0 Alpha launch.
A year or two ago, I didn’t like payperpost , but it wasn’t their fault. What I didn’t like was the back-handing that Google was doing to all the bloggers to tried to make a couple bucks for their opinions. Google dropped me from PR5 to PR0 overnight and with the frustration of trying to get my page rank back up came fear that it could vanish just as easily. Because of that, I stayed away from PPP and a couple other sites for a long time. To be fair, I shouldn’t even say I didn’t like PayPerPost, because that’s not really accurate. Regardless, I found myself sans that revenue stream until recently.
I got an Alpha key a few weeks ago so I could check out the new site before it officially launched and it was a nice change from the old PayPerPost I remembered. The first thing I noticed was the new elegant design. It’s simplified and they’ve cut it down to only the necessary goods.
It’s not as great as SocialSpark (another IZEA site), but It looks like it’ll be much better when they come out of alpha and have more opportunities available. It’s hard to tell where it can go from here and how some of the searching and sorting features will work out until there’s more available, but it’s off to a pretty good start. The only thing that really bothers me is the very limited time frame we get to complete an opportunity. Id love to see them open that up to at least a few days. In any case, after a long time away, I’ll likely be logging into PayPerPost every day to check opportunities like I do currently with SocialSpark. Welcome back, old friend.
Image by chucks via FlickrAbout a week ago, I reviewed a blogging tool called Zemanta. I was very excited about it, but my excitement faded as I clumsily tried to test the software with the very review I was writing. It left me scratching my head and promising to revisit the topic after some more hands-on time with Zemanta. As promised, here’s part two of my Zemanta review.
I am going to keep this one short because I’ve already explained what Zemanta does and how it’s used. I will talk a little about what else I’ve learned in the last week and correct some assumptions from my previous review.
Giving photos a chance again
In my previous review, I choked on the photo adding capabilities of Zemanta. It seemed to me that photos would vanish. This still appears to be the case for me with FireFox 3 on Vista. I find that images will still occasionally vanish, but I have a much better handle on things now. If I want an image, I simply click on it on the right side. If I want a different image instead, I just click a different image. While I am much more comfortable with it, I still have a few suggestions for the developers.
1. I need more images to choose from. I seem to get the same geisha girl with a laptop every time I start a post.
2. Allow me to use more than one image per post.
3. An image should always be placed where the my cursor was in my editing text area before I clicked the image. Every time I add an image, it’s always top right aligned and sometimes, I want it down with the paragraph it relates to.
I have figured out how to add more images sources (like my Flickr account), though it still seems a bit limited. Still, even if I could only add my own images from Flickr, Zemanta saves me a step.
Links make a little more sense now, too.
If you don’t understand Zemanta’s link suggestion tool, it can be a little cumbersome. I guess I always just expect something to happen at my cursor position when I use a tool. When you click a link from one of the drop-downs named after the words they will link, it creates a contextual link for you. This is handy mostly for reference links, but will be nice if their link choices some day include other blogs that will give me trackback links. Currently, they mostly go to Wikipedia, which is to be expected while they grow. If you install Zemanta, be sure to add your own blog and Flickr account so your resources will be available to the rest of us and you’ll get lots of link love.
SEO tags and my apology
This is one area where Zemanta shines and I owe them an apology. The SEO tags functionality does a pretty good job of guessing some tags I would think of that I would normally have to type in as well as some that would have slipped my mind. When I’m done with my post, I just click the tags I want and they’re added. Then I manually add any remaining tags that I want. It’s another time-saver and it works just as it should, despite what I said previously.
Filter, My Stuff, and Preferences
Since I’ve continued to play with Zemanta, I’ve found more that needs to be written about. “Filter” and “My Stuff”, for example, are options just above your image choices. They both make sense given their names. Filter gives you a text box to filter images by keyword. If you happened to type about 100 different things but you’re looking for a photo of a puppy, you can filter images for “puppy” and get what you need faster. “My Stuff” just narrows the image pool to your own images.
Preferences is a whole area I had previously missed. It hides at the bottom of the Zemanta panel. When you click the link, a new window pops up with your preferences page. Included are “Image Position”, which lets you choose the horizontal alignment of your image, “HTML Code Style”, which allows you to choose between standard HTML and xHTML, and “Signature Image”, which is where you choose what style of “re-blog” image you want at the foot of your post (or none). The preferences page includes two additional sections called “Personal” and “My Stuff”. The Personal section allows you to add a bit of personal information, as well as an Amazon.com associates ID. I added mine, but if I happen to mention my favorite movie, Dream a Little Dream, Zemanta offers links to IMDB, Wikipedia and Rotten Tomatoes, but not to Amazon. I am excited about seeing that work, though. The My Stuff section is where you ad your stuff, of course. Here, you can identify your Flickr account, add your social networks, and add blogs and other sources.
My new verdict : Install it
As I said before, I’ve installed the FireFox plugin, so if I ever dislike it, I can remove it. The posts will still have the “Re-Blog” or “Zemified” footer links, but I think it may be a keeper.
CONS:
- Only one image
- Images always at the top
- Amazon links not an option yet?
- Seemingly limited sources
PROS:
- Add images in a snap
- Add tags easily
- Suggests tags I might forget
- Provides resource links
- Provides a means for others to find and use my media and posts
The minor cons can be fixed pretty easily, I think, and the limited resources will improve as more people use it, I feel. My excitement for Zemanta is renewed, and I can’t wait to watch it grow. If you install it, drop a link below to your first Zemanta post and let us know what you think.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d218a986-9fda-49a7-a6bb-8cb90a82b871)
