TravelMole article about agents - like watching a train wreck in motion

I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, cringe or ignore a “train wreck” of an article that has been published on the TravelMole.com website - and the subsequent comments that people have posted. Instead I have decided to write about it…. what did you expect exactly? (TravelMole is a leading UK travel industry news website)

Lets start at the top…. here is the article (registration required, I think). The article, written by well known travel industry journalist Jeremy Skidmore, reports on a presentation that Sarah Archer made at the Elite travel agency group conference in Jerez this week. It is basically about sales skills for travel agents. Nothing too radical really.

On the face of it I disagreed with the premise put forward by Sarah Archer and already said so earlier this week in my blog post about learning to sell or fail - no you need to learn to market! I wasn’t disagreeing that what she said was important, nor that it was as discrete as being right or wrong - but that emphasis could be been made differently. As I should have known, I wasn’t at the conference - so didn’t hear the presentation first hand - so writing about it via reported comments was probably a mistake. Sorry Sarah.

Issue #1
Sarah Archer, the speaker, didn’t agree with the article either….. In a comment she describes Jeremy’s report of what she said at the conference as “not a fail, but not a good pass either”. Frankly she may as well said that Jeremy got it completely wrong because she was being nice.

So, we are off to a good start. It gets better.

Issue #2
So a few of us people (yes, citizen journalists) start to post our thoughts. That seems pretty normal so far. I posted a comment (with a link back to this blog….nice!).

Said Jama writes a comment suggesting you need talented employees to succeed. Well yes, we probably agree with that. However, to follow up, he then sends everyone to go and read a book about a self-improvement system that he happens to be selling.

Richard English, from Retraining (a travel agent training organisation) called Said’s comment spam. I thought it, but didn’t say it. He asked TravelMole to remove the comment as it should not have been let through when moderated. He also called one of Said’s comments “nonsense”.

Said then comes back and says that Richard is “ridiculus” and suggests he is resisting change and that Richard wants to hold old concepts alive. He then described Richard’s views as suicidal….Yikes, you would want to stay on the same side as Said. Do you think TravelMole should have stepped in yet?

Now Richard has come back. It has to be read to be believed. He calls this whole thing a nonsensical can of twaddle - and refers to Said Jama’s breeding and upbringing…. asking about his education etc… (which actually is pertinent - as Said was inferring that people are born to be experts). He calls Said’s comments offensive.

So, what a mess. Poor Richard - he was doing the right thing but ended up on the receiving end of some quite nasty words without just cause. He has replied almost in kind. Would you expect this on a moderated conversation on TravelMole? I wouldn’t.

Issue #3
Just what the heck is TravelMole doing here? I am not talking about moderation - which is a business decision that they can make any which way they like. However they have made two technical decisions that have probably added more oil to the fire than would have been normal for this kind of conversation.

1] When a user posts a comment - the PREMODERATED comment gets sent to all the people who have currently got a published comment on that conversation. This can be several hours before the comment is actually published, if it is published at all (it may not pass moderation). While I appreciate that this may ensure that a conversation gets started earlier (because people can react faster to new comments, while the original article is still in people’s minds) - it can also inflame a situation as you can end up with “tit for tat”.

2] You would have thought the comments trail at the base of the article is in chronological order. Nope. Its in some kind of random order. Therefore unless you are reading each comment as they come in (which I can’t opt out of now I wrote a post on that article on their website) - you won’t have a clue who is replying to what comment. For example, my comment is clearly the first one written (look at the date / time stamp) - but it is in the middle of the list. How does that work exactly?

Summary
Oh dear.

I would:

• Fix the technical issues
• Publish a moderation policy (and stick to it) - in particular around spam and commercial promotions
• Enable users to flag inappropriate content
• Make the audio of what Sarah said at the conference available - so we can actually work out for ourselves what she said and how she said it
• Close new comments on this particular article…. but with a final one from the editor saying why
• Don’t delete the existing comments…. they can serve as a nice example for the border of acceptable behaviour
• Relax

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