stationfour is a web design and marketing agency located in jacksonville, florida

On Wednesday I receive a call in the office from someone telling me that they are with Google and needed to confirm my address on my local business listing. The caller had a thick accent and their phone connection kept dropping. After confirming my address it seems that the caller wants to call back later in the week. Through the garbled connection he asks if Friday at 2pm would be okay. I say sure.

On Thursday I ignore a call from an 800-number, the speaker leaves a message trying to confirm something for Friday at 2pm without mentioning her company or a callback number. I shrug it off.

On Friday I’m out of the office around 2pm getting a haircut (which looks great btw). When I get back in we have a missed call from someone named Harold Kopec, who is apparently was at my location. Confused since I didn’t know I had inadvertently scheduled a meeting with who I assumed was a Google rep and also because I couldn’t imagine what someone from Google would want to meet with Station Four for, I called him back.

Harold is trying to sell me a spot on Google’s local listings (the top ones next to the map). Thinking that this guy is still some way associated with Google I ask if they are moving those to paid listings, since they are free now. He says they are. After a while of listening to a bunch of sales BS, guarantees, and factually incorrect statements I finally stop him and ask him to clarify how this meeting was booked and who was it who called me Wednesday. As it turns out Harold is a sales rep for an outfit called BizPros, which is part of Official Business Listings (http://www.toblonline.com/), no affiliation with Google at all. He tries to apologize saying that they can’t control everything their outsourced telemarketers say.

He keeps going, telling me that I will lose my spot if I don’t hire them and that he’s already signed up some of my competitors (which he lists by name). As it is I have a professional relationship with the owner of one of the companies and will recommend to her that she cut ties with this slimy outfit.

Here’s the deal, they’re trying to sell a service that doesn’t exist. It didn’t sound like they did much SEO, just local business listings. Local business listings are free and easy for anyone to setup. In many cases Google prefers companies that have explicitly setup their listing to those that it just grabs itself. Many companies however have not setup a listing so by simply doing that most companies will actually rank decent in the local listings simply by setting up their account, which can take 10 minutes.

This company has a significant sales apparatus just to sell a made up service. Much like a few web design companies I know that have ‘franchises’ consisting just of a couple sales reps who know nothing about how to manage projects or clients and send everything to a central production center. All this just makes it that much harder for legit and professional marketing and design to properly manage and educate clients.

 The company seems to be located in Tampa, below are the listed officers of the company: