Hi everyone,

Boris from SEMCompare here! Just noticed this Sphinn discussion and wanted to chime in to clarify a few of the concerns that have been brought up in Kalena's post and among the commentators.

Firstly, I do want to thank everyone for their comments, feedback and concerns. Positive or negative, they are always welcomed and appreciated.

Let's begin by addressing the issue of standards in the industry, what MarketingSherpa has done (since they were brought up) and where SEMCompare comes in.

Kalena, in your post you were correct that there are currently no search industry standards nor there is any formal institution imposing those standards. Whether that changes in the future remains to be seen, but in the meantime, it creates a problem. You have 100s of various agencies out there offering the same services (at least on paper - the results, of course, typically vary quite a bit). And then you have customers that have a very difficult time selecting the right agency for themselves due to lack of any information about them. In most cases, there is really no way to know how good a firm is without trying them out - and since SEM is a long-term process, it can wind up to be a costly mistake.

In fact, part of the reason why SEMCompare was launched in the first place was because we had dozens of people over the last year ask us to recommend an SEM agency to them. Because we did not have any direct experience with most of them (we knew many of them, but haven't actually used them), we did not feel comfortable making a recommendation and felt that there should be a better way. That's how the concept came about.

Now, there are a lot of ways that you could go about doing "rankings". MarketingSherpa, I think, went their own way with their report. While it's far from perfect, it offered a useful resource and starting point - where previously there was none. In the link that you referred to, even Danny Sullivan said: "... MarketingSherpa's guide is a resource I'd highly recommend to those seeking an SEM firm. It's not perfect, but it provides an excellent starting point for services offered and an initial list of firms. The rating system must be overhauled. An emphasis on client lists and customer comments may be a move in the right direction."

He actually brought up an interesting point. MarketingSherpa's biggest problem was that they haven't used most of the firms they reviewed! That's why their rankings were a bit problematic, since they were based on the criteria developed solely by the author - which is very subjective. What Danny has pointed out, is that by enabling customers of those agencies to offer feedback may be a move in the right direction.

When we started off with SEMCompare, we knew right away what we did NOT want to be.

We did NOT want to start another website giving a Top 10 SEM Firms list. I feel that those lists do more harm than good since they claim to be something they are not. For example, I come from a web hosting background and within that industry, you can find a dozen websites offering Top 10 Web Host Lists - with the rankings determined solely on the commission paid out to the owner of the site. I think that's harmful to the readers because these sites never disclose what their rankings are truly based on.

We also did not want to come up with our own "standards" and rank everybody based on them because it's very arbitrary. Most of the times, you really don't know how good a firm is until you use them. After all, everybody claims to be the best at what they do. Besides, MarketingSherpa has already done a good job at conducting research and putting together background information on what they feel are the best firms.

So, what we realized is that user-generated reviews offer the most value to potential customers that are seeking information on SEM firms. It's something that most other industries already do (whether it's Lawyers at www.avvo.com, Venture Capitalists at www.thefunded.com, or Contractors at www.angieslist.com) and there is no reason why it can't work for SEM firms. Granted, there are certain concerns regarding the methodology and the "trust" factor - which I'll address further down - but the concept itself is proven and can offer a lot of value. The important part is to present it for what it is - reviews site based on the reviews submitted by other people (NOT editorial reviews or rankings written by SEMCompare staff).

In your post, you also wrote: "... At the end of the day we can’t really endorse or condone reviews on the site.” What? So you aren’t endorsing your own site content? Then why bother creating a site around such content at all?..."

This is a very important point. Our job is to be a platform for other people's content. Much like a forum or even Sphinn itself. After all, does the management of an online community always agrees or endorses the content being published on it by other people? Does Third Door Media agrees or disagrees with what is written in these comments on Sphinn? In both of these examples, the responsibility of the platform is to provide a fair way for everyone to contribute their thoughts - not to be the judge of what's right or wrong.

Furthermore, we are not even claiming that our ratings are a standard by which SEM firms should be measured. All we're doing is giving the consumers a way to rate what THEY feel THEIR experience with that particular company was. When we get a review for a company that has a rating of 4.5 (out of 5), all it claims is that the particular person that wrote the review had an experience that he would rate as 4.5 (and then explain why in his actual review).

The next big issue that was brought up is how do we prevent manipulation and abuse of the system. This is definitely a very valid concern and something that we spent a great deal of time thinking about.

The first important point to mention is that while the reviews are somewhat anonymous to the public (we only display a "nickname" a reviewer chooses to give), we do collect their personal information (full name, email, website address, etc.).

We don't display this information because many of our reviewers are still using the company they are reviewing and we don't want them to be exposed. However, internally, all of this information is used quite extensively. For example:

- We won't approve reviews from free email addresses or from people that don't supply a valid website address. This ensures that we know the identity of every reviewer.

- If a review appears to be suspicious, we will contact the reviewer to verify their identity.

- We implement a number of techniques to prevent companies from reviewing themselves or their competitors. It's a bit off-topic, but one of our sister companies specializes in click fraud detection and prevention, so we have a lot of experience in that area and are able to apply many of the same techniques to SEMCompare.

We don't claim that the system is perfect and I do think that there is a lot of room for us to grow and expand. But just because of that, I don't think that it's fair to disqualify the concept or the site itself. Technology takes time to be improved and there is no way to do it without actually getting started.

The next concern I'd like to address is the legal aspect (I appreciate this concern - if others worry about our well-being, we must be doing something right :)).

As Kalena pointed out, there were some legal issues with the Marketing Sherpa's guide. The thing is that the two products have one critical difference.

MarketingSherpa had a person that went out, done their research, and wrote a comprehensive report on their findings. Then, they packaged it together and sold it. They were a Publisher of that content.

SEMCompare, on their other hand, is a distributor of third party content. What does that mean? In a nutshell, that we simply serve as a platform for people to share their opinions. Provided that we do not edit content to the extent that it alters its meaning, we have legal protection - as a distributor of 3rd party content - under Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act.

Many of you are bloggers. We can draw a parallel here - if somebody goes on your blog and posts a comment that offends somebody... they would not be able to get a case against you because you are not liable for the comments on your blog.

This issue is critical. This immunity is what allows all UGC sites, whether it's forums, sites like Sphinn, or even bloggers - to operate without the fear of being sued for everything that's being written. Of course, there are certain rules involved (if you are interested in a great summary of CDA 230, check out http://www.citmedialaw.org/resources/primer-section-230-communications-decency-act), but it's important to understand how the overall immunity works.

My own question in response to this would be - is the fact that consumers have a forum to express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the companies they've worked with and certain companies may not be happy with that justifies the dismissal of that forum as a whole? We certainly don't want to be sued or threatened by anybody, but does this mean that we shouldn't have created the site because of that fear?

Finally, I'll conclude my response by addressing another "sticky" point - monetization of the website. Throughout Kalena's post and the comments, there were a few concerns brought up regarding that.

First, I think I should make it very clear that there is absolutely, positively no way that an SEM firm can buy a top ranking, buy themselves a good review or pay to have a bad one removed, or anything even remotely similar to that. Not only would this open us up to a lot of legal issues, but this would be unethical, misleading and is simply not something that we would do. Our audience's trust is more important than any short-term financial gain. In fact, we don't even put banner ads on this website because we don't want it to appear that we're endorsing one company over another.

That being said, we are a business and need to earn revenue to pay our employees and to continue providing our services. I think it's understandable and something that everyone can agree with. So, when we developed the site, we looked at a number of potential monetization techniques to decide what would best for this concept.

We finally settled on a concept and created a side service called VendorMatch. Through this service, we connect people interested in SEM services with vendors that can meet their needs. This service has no effect on reviews, is marketed separately and is completely optional to use. Some people come to the site because they are doing research on a specific firm, while others are shopping around and use this service because it saves them time and money. I'm not entirely sure why this was referred to as "unfortunate" in the comments, but I would certainly be more than happy to discuss it further.

Whew... sorry, guys, for making this so long. I just wanted to address all of the issues because it's important for us to make it clear where we come from, what our line of thinking is, and what we wish to achieve with this website.

On a side note, I remember that when we launched Search Marketing Standard, we received quite a few comments saying that it would never work. I believe we were able to change a few minds over the years with SMS, so I think that we'll be able to do it with SEMCompare, as well.

Best,

Boris Mordkovich

@iBrian - Just to make my stance clear, I agreed that there are currently no official standards for the industry to follow developed or enforced by a 3rd party. But we are not claiming to create our own standards. We are not doing any editorial reviews or rating the companies ourselves. We provide a public forum to people to express their experiences – not set a benchmark for all companies to follow. People's experiences and reviews can serve as a valuable resource to others. They just need to be taken for what they are - people’s opinions.

I'm not sure what you meant by the comment of: "you opened a UGC site so you can get other people providing free content." Isn't that what every UGC site is about? Even sites like Sphinn, Digg or many other UGC? You are correct - we wanted community-generated input and that's why we launched SEMCompare. But I’m not clear how this is an argument against the concept?

@Feydakin & @debram  - the ability to respond to reviews will be added in the near future. I wholeheartedly agree that there are a lot of things that we can do in the future and we will. Please do keep in mind that the site is only two weeks old and you need to have real-world feedback in order to steer it in the right direction.

Speaking of new features, I also wanted to mention that based on the input of this discussion, we soon plan on implementing some new functionality that should clear up many of the concerns that were brought up.

1) One of the top concerns that many of you have expressed is the issue with reviews being anonymous. After a number of internal discussions, we will soon de-anonymize the reviews and will display the name and the website of each reviewer. This will ONLY apply to future reviews, as we cannot breach our promise of anonymity to people that have already submitted their feedback. This will make the site more transparent, will allow firms to see who exactly submitted the comments, and address them – if needed.

2) We will implement more stringent controls in place to verify the identity of each reviewer. For one, we will not allow any reviews coming from free email addresses, such as @gmail or others. Additionally, each reviewer will be required to verify their email address before their review goes live.

This will ensure that the reviews are submitted by legitimate people and will control spam submissions, companies submitting reviews on behalf of their clients, and so on.

3) And as mentioned earlier, we will add the ability for SEM firms to respond to reviews and present their point of view (if they wish to do so). We are still in the process of formulating the best and easiest way to do this, but I wanted to make it clear that this feature will be available. 

This is just a small list of things that we plan to do to continue making SEMCompare into a useful and practical resource. We are open to other suggestions and will consider all constructive feedback. 

Have a great night, everyone!