SMOjoe.com

Last week, Smojoe built a beautiful Wordpress blog for TellOscar.com.

If you haven’t heard about this place yet, let me explain Canada’s first user driven complaints website. This web destination might be better described as a customer service reports index, and by that I mean a place that lists both good and bad stories; both compliments and complaints can be recorded.

But very few people bother to write nice things or record pleasant observations here.  No, this site runs on complaints and preserves warnings to consumers researching specific goods and services.

How does TellOscar work?

If you owned a business, and suddenly found your beloved establishment written up in TellOscar’s archives, you’d do whatever possible to get the problem resolved. Am I Right?  You’d pay whatever fees necessary to access the forum and respond to the complainer, personally one on one.  I’m certain you’d pay money to make them happy (or at least keep them quiet), and that’s exactly what Tell Oscar wants you to do: That’s the business model.  When this website gets busy, all of Canada’s biggest corporations will pay a monthly access fee to be able to respond one on one with their unhappiest customers.

Why TellOscar works?

As a savvy consumer, I get frustrated with cut rate customer service departments, foreign call centers and automated telephone messages. People who naively write emails to managers, or letters to head office should not be surprised if their correspondence vanishes into a corporate chasm. TellOscar works its wonders because the complaint is so public it embarrasses the subject into action.

What about Twitter? Isn’t that already the world’s largest complaints website?

Unlike Twitter, which limits each entry to a 140 characters, TellOscar.com lets writers enter pages of details.  There is no limit, and no expiry date. The system preserves each submissions in the vault forever, until they’re resolved, and even that data is archived for perpetuity.  Also noteworthy is TellOscar’s primary focus on Canadian consumers - they have representatives who deal directly with Canadian manufacturers, merchants and service providers and are positioned as impartial advocates for conflict resolution.

Introducing the TellOscar Blog

TellOscar’s new blog is what every customer service blog should be - its the primary conduit for communicating new information and insight into the particulars of a business, and reflections on an industry in general.  This simple Wordpress blog will digest news media, profile other authors and experts and showcase some of the more vitriolic complaints that have been submitted to the site. There’s lots of very interesting content on this website, and the blog can bring even more attention to the best of the best user submitted complaints.

Check out these remarks filed under bad customer service. These are heartbreaking stories.  I want you to look at this alleged assault at McDonalds. Imagine if you were the general manager, and you became aware of this story by reading about it online, what would you do? It’s interesting to learn how two different managers at that franchise became more and more eager to find resolution. They fired the employee, offered coupons, and finally asked what else they could possibly do to get the issue resolved…

Creative complainers are every corporation’s worst nightmare, and with its spiffy new blog, TellOscar.com has just become an even more powerful place to complain.

Canada Blog Friends is not a blog, it is an index of Canada’s best bloggers and should be used more as reference material than reading material.

I tell everyone that this place is a digital manifest of life in Canada.  Our nation’s most amazing new pioneers are listed here, and whenever possible, I try to profile the real human being behind the content. Each author is an expert in something, and their niche wisdom should be explored alongside their contributions to the Blogosphere.

Because the search for experts drives the internet, Canada Blog Friends reminds us that each reader’s trust is just as important as the information provided.

Trust is earned. After I published early pictures of Raymi, Schmutzie and  Phronk, I had some regular readers email me and tell me that they subscribe to these bloggers now.  My true stories about these writers have engendered readers to follow them. And that’s because people desperately want to trust someone.

Here are all the blogs currently featured on Canada Blog Friends. Do you know a great Canadian blogger that’s not on the list?

Urban Native Girl Stuff
Phronk
Gigababy
Ghost of a Flea
Schmutzie
Crunchy Carpets
Empress of Dirt
Raymi the Minx
Shambled Ramblings
Outdoors in Muskoka
Temporarily Me
Five Blondes
The Conveyor Belt
Social Capital Value Add
Product of Newfoundland
Dead Robot
Black Sheep Reviews
Canadian Heroes
One Old Green Bus
Cariboo Ponderer
Young Chic and Social
ModSuperstar
Dumpdiggers