Lookaly Blog - What's happening on Lookaly

Guest post by Whats’s On NI

1. The Ould Lammas Fair in Ballycastle

Ireland’s oldest traditional market fair. Its exact origin is uncertain but one theory is that it began as a result of the occupation of the area around Ballycastle by the MacDonnell’s of the Isles in the early part of the sixteenth century. At the present day Fair, horse trading, street entertainment and market stalls attract thousands of people to Ballycastle.

2. Shoreline Festival Whiteabbey

It’s the highlight of the summer as the famous Shoreline Festival returns with three fabulous days of music and family fun over the August Bank Holiday weekend, running from Saturday 28^th to Monday 30^th August, climaxing with a spectacular fireworks display over Belfast Lough.  This is one of the last opportunities to enjoy some summer fun before the schools go back, so get yourself down to Jordanstown Loughshore Park to experience a weekend of FREE family entertainment that will not disappoint you.

3. August Bank Holiday Monday Funday

Monday 30th August at the Sunken Gardens at McKee Clock    

Clowns, acrobats, jugglers and all manner of street entertainers will be on hand to help the whole family celebrate the August Bank Holiday, as Bangor Town Centre will become a mini theatre for the day.

4. Fishfest 2010 Kilkeel

27^th – 30^th August 

The Annual Fish Fest & Gourmet Seafood Trail will take place August Bank Holiday weekend. The Main event will be held on Monday 30th of August in Kilkeel Town Centre.    This is a must for seafood lovers, with seafood tasting sessions, seafood buffet, seafood cookery demonstrations, oyster eating competition and oyster stall, fresh fish stall, live music, crafts, family entertainment and funfair, Face painting, children’s fish sculpture competition, Bonny Baby competition, Little Miss Mermaid and King Neptune.

5. Family Fun Weekend Armagh Planetarium 

28^th – 29^th August  

To end their summer programme, Armagh Planetarium are holding a Family Fun weekend on Saturday 28th of August and Sunday 29th of August. There will be face painters, rocket building and launching, badge making and the Knights of the Empire will be there along with many more fun activities.

6. Family Day and Charity Football Match

28^th August Glentoran Football Club  

Fun for all the family – bouncy castle, face painting, climbing wall, BBQ and much more. Watch EX-Glentoran legends play in our football match. All in aid of the Meningitis Trust.

7. Bank Holiday Hoo-Ha at Wellbrook Beetling Mill

Monday 30^th August

Enjoy a very funny, gossipy but true living history interpretation of the Mill and those associated with the linen industry in Mid-Ulster. (National Trust admission charges apply).

8. The Waterways Ireland Lough Erne Classic Yacht Regatta

27^th – 30^th August 

Lough Erne Classic Yacht Association and Waterways Ireland are holding their Classic Regatta with sail, steam and motor boats at Crom, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland from Friday 27 to Monday 30 August, with yachts visiting from all over Ireland and the UK.  This promises to be a great weekend for all yachting enthusiasts and families alike. Not since 1913 when Crom was the social hub and centre of the inland yachting world has there been such an assemblage of classic craft. The organising club for this event is the Lough Erne Yacht Club. www.leyc.com

9. McDonald’s Football Open Days Ballymena Showgrounds

29^th August 1pm – 5pm and  Gordan Playing Fields Lurgan 30^th August 10am to 4pm. 

Goalkeeping legend Pat Jennings and fellow former International Jim Magilton are the special guests at McDonald’s Football Open days.  These are free events for families to come along, take part in games and tournaments, receive qualified IFA coaching and meet some footballing heroes. The Cool FM roadshow will also be attending to further add to the friendly, fun atmosphere.

10. Belfast Mela

Celebrating culture and creativity, the Mela, meaning ‘to meet’, will display the sights, smells and sounds of ethnic origins, showcasing music, dance, arts and food from over 30 nations across the globe. Crowds are in for a variety of treats as the event is jam packed with a show stopping schedule, all taking place in the very beautiful Botanic Gardens on 29th August 2010.

Have a great weekend whatever you are up to.  You  can find out what else is happening in NI at www.whatsonni.com, email us at info@whatsonni.com, tweet us at www.twitter.com/whatsonni, and like us at www.facebook.com/www.whatsonni .

Promote your events free at www.whatsonni.com by registering on the home page to create a new account and you are ready to start listing.

If you would like to see your own event review published just email it together with some pics to info@whatsonni.com.

Jacqueline

Last week we launched our iPhone app. The app is already getting good usage (with over 200 downloads in less than one week) and great ratings in the App Store (thanks!).

But what exactly can you do with our app?

1. See places around you

2. Find types of places around you e.g. cafes

3. Find a specific place near you

4. View a location map for any place

5. Phone a place

6. Read reviews from other Lookaly users

7. Write your own review

8. Add a new place

9. Give us feedback

Thanks for all your support. If you would be so kind to leave us a review on iTunes that’d be much appreciated.

Also if you have ideas for improving the app, you can leave feedback and suggestions here.

10. Win an iPod Touch

Write a review and you will enter our competition to win an iPod Touch and Apple Care (worth £191) sponsored by Mac Sys Ltd.

If you don’t have the iPhone app yet, you can download it here.

It’s here!

Very excited to announce Version 1.0 of our iPhone app.

Read more and download the iPhone app here.

We’re giving away an iPod Touch

To celebrate the launch, we’re giving away an Apple iPod Touch 8GB + Apple Care (worth £191 combined), sponsored by Mac Sys Ltd “the only Real Mac Support in Northern Ireland”.

How to win the iPod Touch

1. Write a review between now and September 30th 2010 using either our iPhone app or our website.
2. Ensure you have a membership status of Part-timer and above (this means at least 5 reviews, sorry Newbies)
3. We’ll draw a winner at random at the start of October.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to find out if you’re the winner.

Thank you

Big thank you to Creative Industries Innovation Fund who supported the app and Ecliptic Labs who developed the app.

Also thanks to our community who offered their ideas and input into this project.

Download the Lookaly iPhone app.

p.s. we could do with your help promoting the app so let any of your friends who have an iPhone know about it and remember to drop us some feedback and reviews

It’s came to light that other user review type websites pay people to write reviews. We don’t. Someone recently asked us if we planned to use a similar strategy to add more content to the site. Our answer was no, and here is why.

1. It forces people to review

We want organic reviews. After you have an enjoyable or bad experience we want you to think “I’ll review that on Lookaly”. We don’t want you to sit down and think “I better write 20 reviews ‘cos I have to.”

2. Reviews aren’t genuine

Related to the first point, if you have to write reviews you’ll start making things up. You’ll make things up to pad it out, or you’ll make things up because you’ve ran out of places that you’ve been to to review.

3. It isn’t fair on every one else

We can’t pay one person from the community to write reviews and not pay others. That wouldn’t be fair.

4. It isn’t part of our plan

Our goal is to have a website that helps people make informed decisions on what businesses and services to use, based on reviews from other people. Our plan to reach this goal is to have a community of reviewers (you) contribute freely to the website, not to employ a work force to do this.

5. We can’t afford to

I’ve got to be honest, even if we wanted to pay you we couldn’t afford to. Lookaly is a small 2-man team who are working hard on getting things off the ground. But we’d like to think you wouldn’t want to be paid anyway based on the points above

So why review?

We hope you write reviews because you like to share your experience and you enjoy the site. You enjoy being part of something big and contributing to something that makes a difference in Northern Ireland.

So thanks for using Lookaly and keep the reviews coming.

We’ve made a little widget for all you bloggers and website owners.

Show your friends and readers your latest Lookaly reviews directly from your blog. The widget will update automatically every time you write a review.

You control the height and width of your widget so you can fit it into your layout.

To get your widget, log in to Lookaly and go to the widgets page in your account settings. The code is there for you to copy and paste, or you can click the Blogger button if you use Blogger.

We’ve already got some great local blogs making use of it, great to see.

Last week we mentioned why it can be a good thing to get complaining customers. We came across another useful article, this time by Niall Harbison on Simple Zesty, who talks about dealing with the negative comments you receive online.

…as consumers online become more vocal and are empowered by tools that let them shout louder than ever when they feel slighted. It’s part and parcel of the web but for people affected by it for the first time it can be quite disconcerting and terrifying.

People now have the tools to shout louder online. No longer are bad comments restricted to one to one conversations at the water cooler. Whether it’s using Facebook, Twitter, a blog or an online review website, people are free to say what they think, and you as a business owner can’t ignore this.

Niall’s tips for dealing with these negative comments are:

1. Pause before you engage
2. Don’t threaten legal action
3. Talk about the issue, not the problem
4. Maybe they have a point?
5. Accept that 10% of people won’t like you
6. It’ll be over before it has begun

Read Niall’s full article here.

We’ve mentioned before that no one is perfect. As a business you will never have 100% customer satisfaction, which you just have to accept. But how can getting negative feedback be good for business?

Susan Payton discusses over on Mashable why it’s a good thing your business gets negative feedback, and how to deal with it effectively.

No matter how you interact with unhappy customers, the point is not to brush them off, and make sure you learn from it. Don’t just pretend to listen and then go on doing business as usual. Take the feedback as constructive criticism that can help you determine your company’s future. How you handle your failures could make you or break you.

Being a user review site, we handle a range of customer feedback, roughly 20% of which is negative (1 or 2 star reviews). The negative feedback is far more important than the positive. Don’t ignore it, take it on board and make the necessary changes to improve.

Read Susan’s full article here.

Every so often you may notice a review disappear from a business listing.

At Lookaly, we try our best to remain impartial. We don’t want to get in the way of freedom of speech so we rarely step in and we certainly don’t use any sort of favouritism when it comes to removing reviews.

There are several reasons why reviews may be removed:

1. The review breaks our terms and conditions

There are certain ‘rules’ to stick by when using Lookaly, all of which are outlined in our Terms and Conditions. If you threaten someone, use abusive language, post spam etc. your review will be removed.

These are common sense rules that make the website a nicer place.

2. It’s not a review

Sometimes someone will post a comment as a review, or remark that they’ve never used the business but would (or would not) like to.

As each review has an overall affect on this business’s rating and position on the site, we think it’s only fair that reviews are reserved for actual reviews of the place in question.

3. Automatic removal

We’ve introduced some new technology recently to help combat our ‘gaming the system‘ problem.

Our website will automatically flag up any reviews or user accounts that look suspicious. By suspicious we mean business owners may be signing up for fake accounts and giving their competition bad reviews. These reviews may be automatically removed from listings.

While it may remove the review from the business listing, these reviews will remain public on your individual profile.

Remember you can help

Every review has a ‘Flag review as inappropriate’ link, which will alert us to take a look and see if it needs removed or not.

We’re a small team so we rely on the community as much as possible to make the website a fair place for all.

Thanks for your help and feel free to ask any follow up questions in the comments below.

Without a doubt, based on what the Lookaly community says, boojum is the best rated place in Northern Ireland.

The Mexican burrito bar now has 33 reviews, 26 of which are 5-star reviews.

Boojum have endorsed the fact that they get so many good reviews by adding our logo along with the rest of their social media links on their website, reminding and encouraging satisfied customers to review their service.

If you have never visited boojum, going by what the Lookaly community says you’re missing out on some tasty food.

Does boojum deserve their best place in Northern Ireland status? Where would you say deserves the title?

Lookaly is always working hard to make sure our business listings are search engine friendly.

Thanks to this, we’re able to get you and your business well up the search engines. Take a look at these examples from Google UK in June 2010.

1. Hakka Noodles

Keywords: “Hakka Noodles”
Position: Number 1

2. Harlem Cafe

Keywords: “harlem cafe”
Position: Number 1

3. Shisha Lounge

Keywords: “shisha lounge belfast”
Position: Number 1

Free listing for your business

Maybe you didn’t realise but we have a free listing package for every business, and this free listing lets you add your contact information, location map and adds you to our business directory.

If you run your own business (or know somebody that does) add your business now for free, and start reaping the benefits.