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How can a bad reputation affect your business?

bad reviews 1349552189

According to statistics, 93% of customers read web content before purchasing. 

According to another poll, four out of five people won’t do business with a company with a poor reputation. These unfavorable comments and ratings give the business a bad reputation in customers’ eyes. 

A company may lose more than 80% of its sales due to harmful web information. Can you allow it to happen? The numbers above indicate risks to your organization when we claim that “poor reputation hurts business.”

Customers can quickly reduce their research and decision-making by checking internet reviews and social proof. This implies that a bad reputation will eventually put your firm in critical condition and hurt your chances over time. To enhance the online visibility of their business, the company employed search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to improve its website’s ranking on major search engines.

Continue reading How can a bad reputation affect your business?

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NJ.COM to remove comments from site

anonymous1

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, NJ.COM has announced that on Thursday morning, NJ.com will remove comments from the site. NJ.COM says ,”Archived stories also will have comments eliminated. We understand this will be upsetting to some of the people who read and post comments, but our editors will continue working to find the best ways to engage and hear your voice.”

The Ridgewood blog currently has no plans to eliminate comments anonymous or otherwise at this time or in the foreseeable future. We feel strongly that it is important to know what your neighbors really think and as we all know sometimes its just not pretty .

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the Ridgewood blog loves your comments

troll

August 24,2017
the staff of the Ridgewood

Beverly NJ, In a recent report , “The Great Tech Panic: Trolls Across America” , WIRED magazine cited Beverly, New Jersey as home of the country’s most active internet commenters.

The WIRED article says that Beverly, a tiny city on the Delaware River between Trenton and Philadelphia with a population of 2,513, has 114 residents that were responsible for 150,151 comments in a 16-month period. That’s an average of 1,317 comments each., wow !

While the Ridgewood blog thrives on “comments ” and at times comments have been criticized for being highly controversial in nature , the exchange of information has had a net positive effect in the Village . The debate often centers around the balance between what is appropriate , politically correct  and whats just too far .

The Administrators try to balance free expression without letting commentators devolve into  3rd grade name calling.Sometimes it works and sometimes not. With most of the egregious comments coming from allies of the former mayor ,who also happen to be the biggest complainers about the blog.

The Ridgewood blog has been criticized at times for not posting certain comments and of coarse the blog has its share of trolls  and creepy stalkers . Several local stalkers seem to be suffering from deep physiological mental disorders and or drug and alcohol abuse issues.

Experience and data have demonstrated that often a troll on a particular topic  , is a quality poster on many other topics.

The Wired article analyzed 92 million comments over a 16-month period, written by almost 2 million authors on more than 7,000 forums and did seem to have the traditional media bias .

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Reader says For some, free speech is only good when they agree with it…

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For some, free speech is only good when they agree with it… otherwise it should be deleted.
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Its one thing to oppose speech with other speech. This is the essence of free speech – an exchange of ideas and opinions – even those you find offensive. Freedom is inherently messy. Authoritarianism is inherently neat, but also repressive.
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Freedom also means including everyone – another basic tenant – even those who are “below the standard”. Some might say that the definition of freedom (speech or otherwise) IS the inclusion of those who are “below the standard”. Let’s not forget that in a free society, “the standard” is a naturally occurring measure which is based on ALL participants. In a repressive society, the standard is arbitrarily set.

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BREAKING : Ridgewood Blog Discovers Impostor Attempting to Post as Council Candidate Ramon Hache

Ramon Hache ridgewood NJ

May 8,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, here we go again the Ridgewood blog has discovered an impostor attempting to tilt the Village Council election results by posing the Village Council Candidate Ramon Hache . The blog comment scanner picked up the fraud .The Ramon Hache campaign immediately disavowed the email address and  the comments made .

After last year when an “anonymous” email was used to interfere with the election process and attempt to sabotage Mike Sendon’s job and and his candidacy the voting public is notable touchy about these types of deceptive tactics .

The nature of the comment was to look like Ramon was changing his position on Valley Hospital expansion.

Why you should vote next week for Ridgewood Council
2016/05/06 at 8:37 pm
Ramonhache@google.com
173.3.54.254

No vote for Valley and it becomes Death Valley. Sorry but the
crumbling infrastructure of that facility needs a major revamp to come
close to being the reliable health center it once was. Population has
doubled, medicine has changed and improved and it no longer meets the
standards of a viable facility.

Why you should vote next week for Ridgewood Council
2016/05/06 at 8:37 pm

173.3.54.254

If there are not adequate changes to Valley hospital it will become
Pascack valley: EXTINCT! I personally like having a reliable health
care facility minutes from home. Valley is not and cannot be a valued
facility using a 1960s infrastructure.

Funny how several individuals on the “It takes a village” Facebook page “spent most of a Saturday evening complaining of censorship on this blog for not posting every comment no matter how false ,stupid, racist or bigoted .

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks” ,Spending an entire Saturday night till 1 am repetitively restating the same nonsense makes you look very guilty.  Too frequent and vehement attempts to convince others of some matter of which the opposite is true, thereby making themselves appear defensive, insincere and in the the Village is the hall mark of wrong doers like the “meter thieves”.

So here is a quick review on how comments get approved on this blog . First unlike the Village Council majority we do not publish threats . We do not publish racist or bigoted language . In general we try to minimize the name calling but there is some wiggle room on this one . If your willing to call people names be willing to be called names , alot of people have trouble with this one . Some times a rephrasing of a comment is all that’s needed to get it published . There is a lower standard for attacking public figures and politicians than there is for ordinary citizens. And remember even in Ridgewood there are a few “crazies” out there.

Open Forums depend on a certain level of honesty of their posters so “Trolling” is strictly forbidden .

In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion,often for their own amusement.

If you IP gets branded as a TROLL most of your comments will go directly to spam and we will never see them .

Repeat commentators are another issue , this is where a comment gets repeated for every post whether its relevant or not . The system will block these comments and they will end up in the spam folder as well.

Other issues ; often comments on police business are delayed. Sometimes a comment can  inadvertently disclose police business  and these are also held up for the sake of the officers safety and to not tip off the perpetrators .

Posting comments with links are also delayed , the links must be checked for viruses.

Sometimes comments are approved out of order , nothing diabolical just difficulty reading them on a mobile device.

The blog generally does not post comments on peoples personal life ,such as allegations of adulterous relationships, underage lovers ,drug or alcohol binges , teen issues and so on . Like everything there are odd exceptions.

Anonymity is an option and is and will remain available for readers protection.

And finally for editorial purposes sometimes comments are held because we think they will make a interesting posts ie Rurik Halaby’s insane diatribes.

The Ridgewood blog is an organic news source . News items are sprinkled among reader opinions continually generating more opinions and discussion . Like it or not the Readers are the blog and the editors operate more like a referees. Sometimes we weigh in too much and sometimes too little ,it not an exact science and it takes a lot of effort to balance freedom of expression with over the top name calling. Frankly we think its gotten better and better over the years with broader discussions and greater participation.

Thank you all for your support !