Web 2.0 and Business – Strange Bedfellows
by Fred on 06/04/07 at 12:18 pm
8 comments
Web 2.0 is all about openness and community. Business around the globe are falling over themselves to harness the astonishing potency of having a group of people organically joining forces to endorse their product or service. One of the techniques behind achieving this pot o’ gold is to allow user-controlled content. An example where this has been attempted was last year’s ‘Support Blog’ for iBurst.
Now, you may remember the previous post where I challenged iBurst to provide a solution to our internet woes. Nothing has happened yet, and we’re left to ponder a course of action for our internet set-up*.
This morning I went to check out iBurst’s blog to see if anyone else was feeling the same way. Check out this rant (below). It is one of hundreds of negative posts on the blog.
Hi Guys, Firtsly let me say i have had nothing but trouble from iBurst from the word go. I do NOT recommend this to ANYONE and i never will. iBurst are money hungry theifs in my view. The first few days i had my modem, i ‘Managed’ to download 200 megs of data. This is amazing considering i checked my email a couple of times and thats about it. I am a software developer so i know all about virus updates, windows updates etc etc and believe me machine was not dling anything! Since last night my iburst has been SO DAM SLOW it is unbelieveable. My 56k modem is faster. I use my iBurst for work and it is really pathetic that i cant even do my work. I have decided i am moving to ADSL, enough ripping off has been done thank you. Thank god i didnt sign a contract!!!!!!
Funny thing is, when I look trhough the blog posts and see how the iBurst team have tried to respond to the rising tide of dissatisfaction, I cannot help but feel a grudging sense of admiration. They have tried. God knows, they have tried. In the same way that I have tried to find a reason to stay with them. To be frank, I have been a fan of iBurst from the beginning. I have marvelled at their brand building strategy, their innovative marketing, the speed of rollout.
But now, as they say in the classics, ‘I don’t give a damn.’
And so, with all the clamouring to jump onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon, I have come to the conclusion that the success and failure of whether it will work as a marketing strategy is based on one timeless factor. Execution. Woe to the company that tries an open forum communication strategy without ensuring first that its service delivery is up to scratch!
*In case you’re wondering, we have ordered an ADSL line from Telkom. Die Blou Gevaar is back, baby.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. He runs a web marketing company called World Wide Creative and loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. View more articles by Fred.
Andrew
Apr 8th, 2007
I hear you Fred. We’ve applied for our Telkom ADSL as well. Apparently there is a 6 to 8 week delay for the technician to install, but there is a DIY option. We’re going to give that a bash. Telkom must be flooded with all the people running from iBurst!
Lisa
Apr 10th, 2007
Vodacom 3G has been doing ok for me. We’ve had some trouble with the Fish Hoek tower but Kalk Bay’s been good. And, to their credit, the times it’s been bad, they’ve risen to the challenge!
Aubrey
Apr 10th, 2007
Please encourage as many people as you know to leave IBurst. That way, there will be less people hogging the tower that I use
Unfortunately I can’t leave IBurst
The last time I applied for an ADSL line, it took 6 months. And I wasn’t even living in the wilderness eating locusts and honey at that time!
Adii
Apr 11th, 2007
I’m on ADSL and I must say I’ve been pretty satisfied with Telkom. They installed our line in November – after just a few days that we applied. Our problem has over been with our ISP (saol.com). We’re on uncapped Business ADSL (384kbs), because we share the connection among 7 students, who all want to download their daily dose of new series episodes…So capped was not an option. The problem however has been that our speeds just suddenly drops to 10% or even down completely, which is VERY frustrating when you have clients waiting for a finished job…
Our broadband problems are enough motivation for me to move abroad next year after my studies…Sheesh…
Bryan
Jun 5th, 2007
my company lives on the web – we have adsl from telkom – the isp is telkom so we dont have diluted bandwidth BUT……. we use Iburst for backup when adsl goes down (and when it does, its VERY difficult to get telkom to respond) i bless iburst
Ideate - Small Business in South Africa » The other side of service delivery
Oct 17th, 2007
[...] about South Africa and service delivery. We discussed the stuff that had been posted on Ideate (iBurst, FNB) and he made some pertinent comments which I’ll share with you. I won’t go into [...]
Stan
Feb 18th, 2008
I contacted I-Burst about the slow-down.
They asked me to download DrTCP.
This has not helped very much.
Malcolm
Jul 16th, 2008
I have a recording of a phonecall with iburst, where a key point of their service/accounts communications troubles is revealed .
Basically, their resellers get paid out on “contracts” , like cash for your 2 years’ business.
So they get all the money, and just have to fight (as they do very well) to ignore complaints, requests for cancellation, and even downgrades.
I’ve certainly suffered financially and conveniencewise over this!
Also there’s an issue with the connection being reset often, at iburst’s end of things, making large uploads basically impossible.
This last issue was revealed in the same, recent phonecall, and explains why, even using 2GB a month, I couldn’t get it to upload a files of 100MB. Hardly fair to mention this after over a year of complaints and innefective (technically speaking) service.
If you’re a Mac user, there’s a secret or two you may, as I did, pry out of them eventually. Makes your connection work pretty well for an hour or two in a row. Then, of course resets.
I won’t share that tip here because it’s far wiser to just get any other connection you can. Iburst looks good on it’s claims, though it’s recently been legally forced to remove some of those, but, it sure never did work as advertised!