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TATA and NEN joined hands together to launch one of the most prolific startups contest online on http://www.hotteststartups.in, very interesting idea which has encouraged thousands of startups and brought them to limelight. I would like to congratulate the short-listed companies and wish them the very best.

This post however is to raise an issue which I am sorry to say was very badly handled by the TATA-NEN team.

Our company Zitz Software Solutions (http://www.hotteststartups.in/viewandvote.do?method=fetch&businessFn=viewandvote&startupId=792) also participated in the contest. What I want to discuss over here is the section "Expert Comments" where few experts (in our case 2 of them) comment on the company and the comments are made publicly available for anyone to read. The names of the experts are not disclosed.

The point of concern is one of the reviews which we got from an expert. Here is a snippet which is the cause of concern (use can read the details on the site here):

If the service that they provide is Online Education Marketing then why project the portals -Also Zitz’s claims on expertise on SEO does not reflect in the search results, a search on ‘Bangalore Schools’ does not lists Bangaloreschools.net in the first 5 pages of google.

The reason we took offence to this expert review is that our site http://www.bangaloreschools.net has been ranking in top 10 on google.com, google.co.in, yahoo.com for over 6-8 months now.

We immediately put a comment on our profile refuting this message which was sent out by the expert. We also sent a mail to info@hotteststartups.in on 5th Nov, 2008 and then on 14th Nov 2008 but nobody responded to it.

What makes me wonder is how easy it is to lose track of quality review when there are so many companies to review. But for everyone out there, their company is important to them. Things like this need to go through a quality check and facts need to be corroborated with the startups before posting it as an expert comment on the company profile and misguiding general audience. What is worse is the way our requests for change in the expert comments were handled. No one even got back to us!

Our company is important to us and we are privileged to be part of the TATA NEN content but it might have done us more harm then good, all due to some expert not having enough time to check Google results properly before commenting on our site. Who should be held accountable for this mistake and what can remedy this situation for us?

I would like to hear what the contest organizers have to say about this.

UPDATE:

After this blog post, I got calls from NEN inquiring about this situation. But here is what they had to say":

“The expert reviewer has agreed to withdraw his line but he does not agree that he posted it by mistake.”

I was amazed at the response and told them in clear terms that there are two things which I do not like about your statement:

1. The very day we received expert comments, I had replied to hotteststartups about it being wrong so there is no way the expert did not do a mistake. He may be an expert in your view but such carelessness on a company review is highly unacceptable.
2. I told that lady that you are not doing me a favor by editing the comment. You did a mistake publicly so why don’t you apologize publicly. She said she would get back to me and then I never heard from her.

The point is, it is easy to call in person and apologize (which I think they did not do at all but made me feel as if they are doing a favor by fixing that comment) but if you did a mistake publicly why not apologize publicly?

The comment has been fixed on the website now so I have attached a snapshot of the controversial comment here (in red box on the image, click on image to enlarge):

(click on the image to enlarge)

Let us wait and see what NEN does to take care of this mistake.

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