End of Day Summary Day 10

If Vahinkovakuutus Refuse to Give me Straight Answers

Well it has been another increasingly frustrating day. Yesterday i posted a request to If vahinkovakuutus to just answer my questions directly. I am tired of fighting with them. I have clearly outlined my argument and so have they. As such i posted some clear questions for them to answer.

Well their response to this was something a politician would have been proud of.

They totally avoided the questions and as such i reposted requesting clear answers to those questions. See below.

View the thread here

If Insurance have blocked me from their other regional Facebook Pages (see post here)

Nicely done and really in the spirit of social CRM. If you are just making your self look stupid. Nothing offensive was placed there and nothing critical of If. Yet again If vahinkovakuutus are trying to control social media as if they owned it and it was their own website. When will they learn social media etiquette states that you should not try and control the conversation especially when there none offensive content.

Interestingly i need to add an update. I am now unblocked and can post again. Is this a response to the above post?

I Finally Published the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Post (click here)

I promised to write a post about SEO for blogger blogs in particular for some time and now i have finally done it. I wish that i had known all of this information before i began but at least now i think i have fairly good SEO as my blog is appearing on the first page of google searches for the keywords i wanted.

I seem to have noticed a slight backlash against my strategy. (see post)

It seems that If vahinkovakuutus have experienced an increase in postive feedback on their Facebook page. Was this as a response to my own behaviour. I take a look at this possibility from a cultural perspective and consider that it may be a response to me being a foreigner and a defnsive position taken as they feel that i may be atacking Finland as a whole.

I have expanded my use of social media again

I have now posted on to If's competitors social media walls and referenced my story by stating

"aren't you glad you are not an If customer". Op-Pohjola coincidently liked my post.

Op Pohjola's Facebook Page Wall

If Vahinkovakuutus have blocked me!

How is this for nice customer service and PR. In terms of social engagement If vahinkovakuutus have again failed.

This time it is not If Finland who are necessarily at fault. I have been blocked from using the other If regional facebook groups.

As i mentioned in a previous post i have been using If vahinkovakuutus's own social media as a piggybacking strategy and tool against them. This could have actually been beneficial to them if they had not lost the opportunity that i originally highlighted to them in the start of this story.

As i mentioned in the social media as a piggybacking strategy post i would later reveal how succesful this was. Well during the first day i did notice an increase in traffic from Latvia, Lithunia and Norway in particular but interestingly not from Sweden.

This was short lived however. Today for interest sake i decided to take a look to see if those original links i had put to link to my blog were still there.

Original Post added to If Insurance Swedens Facebook Group

As you can i see i did not put anything offensive or derogatory i just asked simply would you be interested in seeing what is going on in Finland?

Well it seems that this is enough for If Vahinkovakuutus to block me from their other Facebook groups. Well that is a nice engagement strategy. Granted it is not nice for those areas and they were just trying to protect their own customer base but i think that this goes against the principles of Social CRM.  Also i believe that this also fuels the negative perception of If as a whole. I did not attack them i did not criticise them on their own social media i just tried to engage them. I only posted once on those Facebookg groups.

Once again nicely played If Vahinkovakuutus. You are showing the world that your social media strategy, social engagement and customer service suck.

In a response to this i have today mentioned politely the existence of this blog on If vahinkovakuutus's competitor's Facebook groups such as Tapiola and Pohjola. They cannot control that media :-)



Visit Tapiola's Facebook Group

If Vahinkovakutus Must be bloody stupid!

Well yesterday i posted my questions to If vahinkovakutus.

See Post

Well they answered and i am sooo bloody annoyed by them it is like they were damned politicians. What kind of response is this!!!

I am very quickly getting very tired of If. There is no reasoning with them . I HATE INSURANCE COMPANIES!!!!!!

Yesterday i decided that i wanted to end this as i am just so tired of fighting what ultimately seems to be a losing battle. IF vahinkovakuutus just answer the questions so i can finish the damn story!!!

Well the tide seems to be turning

Well today i noticed for the first time that there seems to be a new pattern emerging of people publishing their success stories onto If vahinkovakuutus's wall. This has happenned a few times now but it seems to have increased in response to my actions.

Well this may mean that i have alienated my audience to the point where they themselves want to actively defend If vahinkovakuutus. Or if have been very clever and carried out their own counter campaign?

Why would the Finns turn agains me? I have not only been trying to overturn my claim decision but have also tried to get if to change their own terms and policies so as to protect other customers. It seems to me if anything they should be getting behind me.

Well i think again there are factors at play outside of my control. This is namely the Finnish culture. Finns are very patriotic and truely believe in all things Finnish and Finland. Finland is the golden land. BTW that is why when Finns leave for foreign jobs they often say they are never coming back ;-)

Anyway with the rise of  the True Finns political party and the increasing resistance to immigration of foreigners to Finland by the native population there has also been a clear switch of national attention to multiculturalism in Finland generally.

Well as a foreigner in Finland it may very well be that i have singled myself out as someone who goes against the tide, is not afraid to question and try something different. Also as a foreigner in Finland and with the sentiment to foreigners in this country i myself may have managed to portray myself actually as the bad guy in this story. Finns unite against the foreigner?

You may think this silly but it is probably true at least to some degree. I have encountered this so many times here almost to the point of stupidity.

In Finland there is a common dreaded word by all "putkiremontti". Basically it is when your appartment needs to be rennovated and have all the drains, water and often electricity replaced. This is usually carried out through all apparments simultaneously. Finland runs all its appartment buildings as independent companies that are run as democracies so when this happens there is a vote on the subject.

Well having been through this experience this is my story of Finns and Finland. At our housing company meeting we were presented with a proposal by the chairman's friend to do the work for an absolutely obsorbitant fee. I stood up and said that this was an absolute joke as the appartment building next door had paid half as much and that this was clearly a ploy to help the chairmans mate out. An old lady turned around and said to me "he does this work all the time, i am sure he knows what he is talking about, you should listen to him". The vote was passed and we paid double the price we should have.

Finns are very trusting, they do not like people who question, go against the tide, try something different or are of foreign origin. Unfortunately in this situation i am the entire wammy and as such perhaps have come in for a backlash from the Finns in spite of the rational argument that actually would benefit them if I am succesful.
However this would require a degree of empathy something that in my personal experience Finns are not good at.

If you are a Finn and are reading this you may not like what i am saying but consider this, what has happenned to me as a foreigner to actually make me think this way? We are formed by our experiences. We do not arrive with this impression of Finland it is programmed into us.

How to: SEO for your Blogger Blog

So finally as promised a post about SEO for Blogs. Well firstly why is SEO important for not only my blog but your blog.

SEO means search engine optimisation and basically means that you optimise your blog so that, among other things your blog will appear higher in search results for search engines such as google, yahoo and bing.

However this is not the whole story, as i mentioned in my previous post this will also have an influence upon the type of advertisements your visitors are presented with.

In any case without search engine optimisation it at least makes it very difficult for your audience to find you. This in turn means that there are an awful lot of quality blogs out there that have fallen between the cracks and simply for most people do not exist.

Basically there are two sides to this coin. What you can do on your site-blog and what offsite strategies can be employed.

Onsite- Within your blog

The first thing to think about is your audience. Who do you want to attract to your site, what kind of search words do you want them to be able to find your blog with. With this in mind you need to.

1. Use your most important search words in the naming of your blog. If you already have your URL and do not want to change it then at least change the title as it appears on your blog.
2. Write a description (header) for your blog that describes the content and uses again more of your keywords.
3. Ensure you have enough content. The more content that you have on your topic the better.
4. Use the labels of your posts to also reference your keywords.
5. Not only thnik about volumes of content but also good content on a subject people are interested in. Volumes of traffic will affect your ranking.
6. Recent content needs to be added so as to keep the blog fresh and alive in the eyes of the search engines. See point 15 also.
7. Try and use your keywords in Headings of your articles and in their URL's
8. Use alt tags on your images. See how 
9. Use heading tags also See how
10. Site design. Obivously a nice looking site will work for your users but it also helps those little robots that search engines send to index your site. Avoid deadlinks especially and try and interlink the content on your blog. This will not only help your visitors navigate but also those little pesky robots.
11. Write optimal length posts at least 250 words.
12. Don't duplicate blog content in multiple posts.
13. Outgoing links. By Adding links to sources outside of your blog that is relevant to your content then this should also help your blog appear higher in search results although exactly how effective this is is often debated.
14. Add a sitemap to your blog. This is nice actually for your users and may/maynot help with SEO but here is the solution i employed. See here. You just need to create a page and paste in the HTML from the linked blog. This is the easiest solution that i could find in the blogosphere.
15. Ping. Use tools such as Pingomatic to tell those little robots to come and take a look what is going on. Also add your blog to google's blog search. See also offsite SEO.
16. Submit your site to be indexed from google webmaster tool site submit.
17. Add a sitemap under google webmaster tools simply sign in with your blogger account and go to sitemap as shown in the below image. All blogger blogs have a predefined sitemap that automatically updates. To add yours simply add rss.xml to the url of your blog home page. This is effectively your rss feed and not really a site map but it will allow google to index it. 

Offsite SEO.

In this respect quite honestly there is not so much that you can do. This is because you cannot control this yourself for the most part.

One of the main factors affecting this are offsite links that direct to your blog. There are some services where you can buy these but i would not recommend that as it requires spending money and also there has been a crackdonw on this practice by search engines in recent times.

However one free way to generate these links is by having your blog listed in various blog directories. This also has the added benefit of being able to garner yout blog a little extra traffic from these services. For the most part adding your blog is free to these services but quite often these services require a reciprical link back to their service to be added to your blog. I have added a page simply called blog directories where i have added these links. Some services will offer you a specific code snippet or button code that you can simply paste into the HTML of the page of your reciprical link location. Click this once to let the services know that you have added the link. Others will just require the location of your link and they presumably check this manually later.

In any case adding your blogs to these directories may take some time for the directories to process so start as soon as you have enough content that they will agreee to add your blog. I would recommend at least 10-15 posts to start with.

Almost all of these services ask for a description of the blog and meta key words so i would recommend spending some time thinking about this. Save this into notepad or word so you can simply cut and paste it in each time. If you don't do this, it will very quickly become annoying if you are trying to add your blog to many directories in one session.

Here is a list of blog directories available on the web. This should keep you occupied for quite some time ;-)

Well that is about it. And Just to prove it works here is what i managed to achieve using these techniques. I managed to get my blog to appear second in googles search results for "IF Vakuutus" (if insurance in Finnish) second only after If's own Finnish site even though none of my content was in Finnish.