Following on from yesterdays post regarding the very real problem Oz Experience are facing with the third search result being completely negative about Oz Experience we went through many of the social media sites such as Travelblog, Lonely Planet, BUG and so on and reviewed a bit more closely what people were saying about the company.

Generally it is pretty good but there are a number of people in these forums that are hell bent on slagging the company off regardless - in fact, when I looked really closely the same people seemed hell bent on slagging off most independent companies trying to do their own thing. You have to wonder if they are not simply competitors or what their self interested motive is. The frustrating thing we noticed was the number of honest questions being asked that were not being answered - such as someone asking if they could be told about Surf Camp and the answers being such insightful things as “Greyhound goes there - don’t use Oz Experience” - and nothing about the surf camp itself.

We decided that we would try creating a thread in some of these sites in which Oz Experience staff made themselves available to answer any questions and feedback and also to announce the new website if anyone had any wish to stick their sixpence in their as well. I thought this was a brave move as we are basically entering the lions den; and yes, within a few hours the mud-slinging on the Lonely Planet forum started by a couple of users asking about sex and calling the trip “the f… truck” etc. Bruce Thurlow on behalf of Oz Experience continued to humour their banter with honest answers and opinions. He was not hiding anything. The guys making the comments however were just being shear bloody minded - not giving him a chance and most likely intimidating any reasonable users who may have had a serious question. These guys had 3,000 + and 8,000+ posts to their names - clearly people who do a lot of travel from the armchair in front of their computers, and neither of them had travelled on Oz Experience!

Nonetheless, Lonely Planet removed the thread within hours and Boots n All within an hour - not even letting the conversation get going. Quite frankly this is wrong! Their justification is no commercial promotion in the site. Sure, but what about truthfulness. Guys are able to exist in these forums basically bagging tourism operators s without the operators being able to be themselves and fight their own corner. All that leads to is companies hiding behind aliases further bagging their competitors.

Is it legal that these sites can have these discussions about companies without their involvement? Oz Expereince is a trademarked name and going back to yesterdays post these companies are gaining search engine traffic based on these terms which are proprietary - perhaps the only course of action is that these forums either open these doors to the tourism companies to be involved or they remove every post and thread that refers to a company directly or indirectly. After all we all know that the TV show Big Brother blocks out the sound every time the conversation drifts to a person or company that is not on the show in fear of legal reprisals. Most companies trademark their keywords and as such competitors can’t use them in Adwords campaigns etc., what’s the difference here?

What are the travel communities scared of by banning tourism companies from getting involved and fighting their corner anyway? Let’s be honest the readers of these sites are not stupid. If Bruce from Oz Experience clearly identified as such starts hammering a bad word about an alternative product they are going to see through it pretty quickly. If he over promotes his products with flowery superlatives again his information will be seen as marketing hyperbole and users will leave the thread discounting his posts. Instead sites such as Lonely Planet and Boots n All are perpetuating a load of slander and one sided rubbish by guys such as larc and ianw who can not surely be reliable sources of travel information while they are able to sit there all day banging out thousands of posts, which would be virtually impossible for a real traveller to do - without doing what they are supposed to do - provide a medium for discussion and information flow.

If you would like to see the forum thread before it was shut down by Lonely Planet you can view it here

Tags: Boots n All, Lonely Planet, Oz Experience, Web 2.0

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.