Failing Enterprise Blog 2006-01

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The Admin talks about our online community

Thursday, January 26th

Another law firm has contacted us and asked us to post a message to current and former employees of Enterprise Rent-A-Car.  See our page on Enterprise Rent-A-Car law firms.  They would like to speak with current and former Assistant Managers about working hours.

Wednesday, January 25th

I'm always looking for better ways to help our community members, and many people feel the Group-specific forums are particularly useful.  Due to to increased participation by several groups, I've added three new forums specifically for:

Group 10 - MA, ME
Group 16 - MD, DC
Group 53 - NC

A week ago, I added a new forum for French-Speaking Canada, and it hasn't done well.  Maybe I need to get the word out in French?

There's also a new forum specifically for Sexual Harassment at the workplace for Enterprise employees; this topic seems to keep generating new posts.

Lastly, I've created a new forum for the "discovered" damage and other repair scams that customers just keep getting bitten by.

For the past two days, we've served over 33,000 page views per day.  This is simply amazing.

Tuesday, January 24th

The Failing Enterprise telephone message line has run its course and I'm closing it down.  I got the phone call I was waiting for.  Thanks to everyone who left me a message!

Sunday, January 22nd

The page on Enterprise Rent-A-Car on the Wikipedia has been vandalized again.  Sure, it's easy to just roll it back to a previous known good version, but I wish whoever was doing this would stop.

They're coming from IP address 71.53.112.114.  The GeoBytes IP Address Locator doesn't have a location for it, but IP2Location.com and Melissa Data both trace it to Winter Park, Florida.

The reverse DNS lookup shows nc-71-53-112-114.dhcp.sprint-hsd.net, so it's obviously a Sprint DSL customer using a dynamically-assigned IP address.

Here are the last few hops of a TraceRoute, showing the trail through Sprint's network:

14 82 ms 81 ms 82 ms sl-gw19-rly-3-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.247.85]
15 87 ms 87 ms 88 ms sl-sprintwrbm-19-0.sprintlink.net [160.81.168.230]
16 88 ms 88 ms 88 ms nc-69-69-52-246.sta.sprint-hsd.net [69.69.52.246]
17 119 ms 121 ms 120 ms nc-71-53-112-114.dhcp.sprint-hsd.net [71.53.112.114]

A note to the vandal:  Send me e-mail to comments2 ((at)) failingenterprise ((dot)) com to talk about this.

Tuesday, January 17th

Despite the fact that the postcard mailing campaign was a limited trial run, it appears to have been a smashing success!  Traffic for the past week or so has been running 30-100% higher than expected, depending upon which metric you use.  This is pretty sweet, given that it was taking us 6-7 months to double our traffic before the campaign.  We'll have to see how much of this increase we sustain going forward, but I'm pretty certain that if people visit our discussion board even once, they'll be addicted and just keep coming back.  And then, of course, there's word of mouth.

The success of this campaign also confirms what I had suspected, that there are still lots of Enterprise employees who have not yet heard of Failing Enterprise, and that a simple invitation can lead them to become eager readers.

I'm now getting requests to mail postcards to more U.S. groups, as well as to the Canadian and U.K. groups.  Let's see what the future brings!

I've updated the traffic reports page and charts.  For the past seven days, we've served an average of 25,000 pages per day!  This is amazing compared to just ten months ago when we served fewer than 6,000 page views per day.  Since Enterprise's lawyers bullied our third-party discussion board into shutting us down last March, forcing us to build our own discussion board in-house, our traffic has doubled, and then doubled again.  It was the best thing that could have happened to us.

In the big picture of the Internet, serving 25,000 page views per day makes us a significant medium-sized web site.  All trends indicate another doubling in the next 6-7 months.

Sunday, January 15th

I just completed an update on our page comparing Alexa traffic rankings.  We're still #2, behind only the PayPal Sucks site.  In fact, of the six sites mentioned in last year's Forbes magazine round-up on top corporate hate sites, we get more traffic than five of them.  We're also still getting more traffic than either of Enterprise's recruiting sites, which really has to be embarrassing.

Saturday, January 14th

A month or two ago I started placing ads for Failing Enterprise through Google to run on both its search engine web site and on its affiliate websites.  I wanted to be able to invite more people to have a look at our website, particularly if they were considering becoming an Enterprise Rent-A-Car customer or employee.  I figured more information is better than less and I was willing to pay a modest fee out of my own pocket to show ads inviting people to have a look.

I was confident that I could use the terms "Enterprise" or "Enterprise Rent-A-Car" in the ads, despite Enterprise having a trademark on them because I was using their mark only for purposes of identification, wasn't using them for any "commercial purpose", and thus was well within the protective exception known as "Fair Use".  I'm no attorney, but my attorney assured me we were fine here.

I'm disappointed to say that both Enterprise and Google have participated in some really shameful behavior here and together are blocking my ads.  Enterprise contacted Google and demanded the ads be banned.  I made my argument about "Fair Use" and Google completely wimped out.

Here is my final e-mail to Google:

This is Google's final response:

Here is my response:  This week the U.S. Postal Service delivered thousands of postcards to a subset of Enterprise branches through the U.S.  It was a trial run to see how effective direct mail to the branches would be, and it's obviously been very effective.  If Enterprise wants to try to bully my providers (again) into removing truthful information off the Internet, then I'll get the word out through other means.

I am reminded of their efforts last March to bully my third-party discussion board provider and my internet service provider.  In that case, they were effective at shutting down the old discussion board.  My response was to build the new discussion board, on my own server in my own Class A Data Center and create my own Terms of Use.  Their shutting down our old discussion board was the best thing that ever happened to us as we now have a much better, faster, more configurable board and have received 23,000 new postings on it in the past ten months.

Once again, bullying by Enterprise attorneys has led to a response from us that has led to our becoming stronger and better than ever.

Friday, January 13th

Yesterday was another day of records.  We had 123,817 hits (a new record) and served 853,361 KB (a new record) and our daily post count average is up to 264 (also a new record).  We also served 34,243 web pages.  Wow!  I guess direct mail works, although I must say this was a particularly well-targeted mailing list.

I got confirmation yesterday the postcards were arriving at branches in Washington state.  Sweet!

Thursday, January 12th

Yesterday was Day Three of Postcard Week.  We were visited by 1,936 unique IP addresses (another new record), had 3,980 web sessions (visits), served 31,405 pages, pushed 819,724 KB of data (another new record) and had our third consecutive day of 320+ posts on the discussion board.  Direct mail works!

I've also now updated the Enterprise Rent-A-Car page on Wikipedia with this year's financial estimates, a minor enhancement and a small correction.

Wednesday, January 11th

Yesterday was Day Two of Postcard Week.  We've now heard from branch employees in Missouri, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.  That means there are a lot more to be delivered.

Traffic yesterday was amazing.  We were visited by 1,931 unique IP addresses (a new record), served 119,259 hits (a new record) and pushed 817,998 KB of data (also a new record).  We also served an astonishing 29,245 pages!  It looks like the postcard campaign is working!  It also looks like our 10% per month exponential growth rate in traffic is now increasing.

Tuesday, January 10th

We set a couple of new traffic records yesterday.  I've been working on a direct mail piece to the branches for a couple of weeks now and some of the postcards were delivered yesterday.  I've heard from branches in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  I think we're going to be hearing from a lot more branches tonight.

Yesterday we had 100,583 hits on the site, served 603,318 KB of data, and saw 379 new posts on the discussion board, all of them new records.  This is starting to make us a medium-sized web site in the grand scheme of things.  We're not up there with craigslist or eBay yet, but we're definitely no longer down in the weeds.  Traffic keeps doubling every six months or so and I think we've got several more years of this exponential growth ahead of us.

I wish Enterprise would make the changes they so obviously need to make and would quit with the unethical and probably illegal behavior, but they seem bound and determined to dig in their heels, pretend the Internet doesn't exist and hope this whole thing blows over.  In free markets, dinosaurs like this get replaced by nimbler companies who "get it".

After two years, Enterprise is apparently still hoping that if they ignore Failing Enterprise we'll somehow just go away.  We served 23,123 web pages yesterday.  Are they slow learners?

Saturday, January 7th

Happy Birthday to Failing Enterprise!  At the end of December we celebrated our 2nd birthday.  Does this mean Failing Enterprise is now in its "terrible two's"?  Let's hope so.

Traffic continues to steadily increase.  For the last two days we've served 22,000 pages per day, and the discussion board now has 27,000 messages and is gaining 1,000 new ones each week.  I've updated the traffic report page to reflect the new increases.

More on Enterprise car rental at the Failing Enterprise home page.