Complaint Review: Hearst Media Services - Nationwide

This group started with enormous promises about how this campaign and expenditure would sky rocket my business to the top of the industry and new clients would just line up.  My salesperson, James Burns, indicated his "A" team would work their magic writing my content, growing my social media following and push me to the first page on search engines.

What I actually received was anything but.  Facebook posts that didn't even make sense, no new Likes, mobile site content that exhibited a complete disregard to understand my industry and my goals and absolutely no growth in website traffic or increase in sales.  After three months, I contacted my salesperson about my dissatisfaction and was told curtly that he was no longer my contact person!

There were many apologies from my contact person with assurances that it "took some time" to get it right.  What they actually did was to tell me that it was my responsibility to write the content through the dashboard if I wasn't happy with the work of the "A" team.  After six months, I insisted they take down mobile site they had written.  I assumed it had been done.  Bad assumption.

My contract started 4/1/13. When the year contract was near its end, I had a visit from my account manager.  I indicated my disgust for their services and said I would not be renewing the contract.  The hard part in all this is that I came to like my account manager personally.  My mistake, I guess.  I had been considering a Google Adwords campaign and decided to give them a try at this simple task.  It was about a 100% mark-up for management fees.  I signed up for a 1 year contract that came in $100 more per month than I had been spending.  Again, my mistake.

The real issue here is that late the following August, I realized that the "A" team was still at work.  Posting to facebook, Twitter and that d**n mobile site was still up and active.  Nearly a full year later and almost six months past when it was under contract.  Flabbergasted, I call my contact person.  He said oops!  I thought that was the end of it since the social media posts ceased.

I had been getting occasional feedback from clients that there were pages on my website that wouldn't load.  Everytime I checked, they worked.  Finally, in January 2014, I had a potential client say that pages were unavailable when she logged in with her Iphone.  It turns out that when I called back in late August to report that the "A" team was still at it, they did a cut and run leaving the code for their mobile site still on my website.  For five months, mobile users were not able to view half the pages on my site!

When I brought this fact to the attention of the VP for my state, Tony Fasanella, it was first ignored, then denied.  After I persisted, I was offered a $150 credit.  My first reaction was to inform them that I would make no further payments for the remainder of the contract. Of course, I was told it would be referred for collection.  

I originally thought that this whole debacle was my own fault for trusting and not researching.  I've since heard from two other clients of this company who had a similar experience.  Run, don't walk away from Hears!.  Save your hard-earned money and find a local SEO person who actually wants your business to succeed.

I am sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with our team and products. It is my understanding that you have been fully reimbursed all your monies and there has NOT been an early cancellation fee assesed to your account.

Once again I apologize that you feel you had a bad experience, but I am comfident that we handled the situation correctly and you were refunded all of your money. Of course not the outcome that I want to see in the end, ideally I would like to see that we fixed any issues and you remained with us as a satisfied and fullfilled client.

Please feel free to contact me outside of this platform so I can get a better understanding of what happened, I would like to make sure that we are servicing all of our clients with great care and understanding of their business.

Thanks

Tony Fasanella

Sr. Vice President

Digital Media

Hearst Corp.