I’m on vacation, sunning on a patio in Palm Springs while my unfortunate colleagues shiver back home in Saskatoon.

But I’m still keeping up with my email. StepRep brought me an interesting result this morning. A while back my band Sea Water Bliss put out a low-budget music video that became moderately popular, especially in Europe. The video has appeared in a bunch of blogs written in a bunch of languages that I can’t read.

Thanks to StepRep’s Reputation Monitor, I receive regular updates on my band’s virtual tour of the Old World. Today I was alerted to the fact that our video had appeared on the French blog Fumez La Moquette (“Steam The Carpet”).

“Un travail de titan pour un résultat bluffant,” reads the caption – “A titanic labour for an awesome result.” Nice.

Having by now seen my video praised as well as belittled in numerous online forums, I hardly needed to strain my tenth-grade French skills to interpret what the commenters were saying about it. Most of them liked it, some snarked about it, and a few wondered how many trees were chopped down to make it. (The answer is “many”.) But this comment piqued my curiosity:

sinon le bassiste dans la vidéo me fait pensée à l’acteur dans Very bad trip le beau frère louche

(“By the way, the bassist in this video makes me think of the actor in Very Bad Trip, the dissipated brother-in-law.”)

It took some Googling to figure out that Very Bad Trip is the title under which the film The Hangover was released in France and Belgium. Isn’t that weird? Instead of translating the word “hangover” into French, the distributors released the film under an English-language title that was different from the original title! Why would they do that?

Anyway, this commenter is saying that Sea Water Bliss bassist Andrew Hall looks like the co-star of The Hangover, Zach Galifianakis. See the resemblance?

Zach Galifianakis and Andrew Hall

Mmm…maybe a little in the beard area?

This is just one more example of the fun that can come from using StepRep to monitor your online reputation. And that’s my contribution to StepRep’s marketing efforts for today. Now where’d I put that crossword puzzle…?

Just kidding. Even if I had an opinion about how the United States should fix its health care system – which, as a Canadian, I don’t – this wouldn’t be the place to air it.

But over the long weekend I was reading this article by David Goldhill in the Atlantic. Goldhill argues that the problem with American health care is that it’s not paid for directly by the consumers – sick people – but by the insurance industry. He points out how weird this is:

We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance.

So unlike other businesses, which have to focus on good service and competitive pricing to attract customers, health care providers can get away with half-assed service and Byzantine pricing schemes because their real customers aren’t the poor chumps in the paper gowns, but the insurance companies.

Goldhill also writes – and I’m arriving at the point, here, so stay with me:

It’s astonishingly difficult for consumers to find any health-care information that would enable them to make informed choices – based not just on price, but on quality of care or the rate of preventable medical errors.

It’s a matter for democratic debate whether health care should be a consumer good like any other; whether it should be paid for out of pocket, or by an insurance company, or by the government. But I think everyone would agree that citizens ought to be able to shop for a doctor in the same straightforward way that they shop for other services – by comparing prices, by looking for reviews online, and by asking their friends who they recommend.

Correction. I suppose there’s one group that would disagree: bad doctors.

People who are bad at their jobs rely on consumer confusion to keep themselves in business. No-one deliberately goes to a bad doctor twice; but many of us are too ill-informed to tell the difference between good medical care and bad.

The same applies, of course, for any industry. People innocently give their business to reckless real estate agents, clumsy carpenters, and visionless videographers.

Obviously, consumers suffer. And competent real estate agents, carpenters, and videographers suffer, because they lose business to hacks. You could even argue that the hacks suffer – they lurch along in careers they’re lousy at, instead of getting a clear economic signal that they ought to try a different line of work.

I think of StepRep and MyFrontSteps as an alliance between consumers and competent service providers. By connecting with the businesses they know and trust, people can steer their friends toward experts that won’t rip them off.

As you can see, this post has very little to do with health care. But it has everything to do with reform – reforming the way consumers think. We’re no longer powerless, even when we’re sitting in a waiting room wearing a drafty paper gown. The internet has given us amazing new tools for evaluating the quality of the services we pay for. We’ve just gotta start using them.

The last time we saw the Spokesmonster he was knuckle-walking off into the sunset, his life having been perfected by StepRep. Now it’s MyFrontSteps that needs a promotional push, so our beloved mascot has been forced to cancel his retirement plans.

(Watch for a cameo by MyFrontSteps CEO Brendan King!)

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post called Selling sunrise. The gist of it was that no matter how great your product is, it will live or die based on how well it is marketed. Whether you’re selling soap, or sliced bread, or sunrise – if people don’t understand how your product will improve their lives, they’re not going to use it.

Here’s a good example. After watching the most recent Spokesmonster cartoon, which deals with referral fees (a feature that’s still in development), a guy named Doug made the following comment:

That is a terrible business model. $100 for a referral. As an interior painter I would not pay $10 for a customer referral until I have been paid by that customer.

Doug’s right – $100 for a referral is a lousy deal if you don’t get a guaranteed sale out of it. That’s why with StepRep you don’t pay a dime unless you complete a transaction.

This is hugely important, and I guess the point wasn’t made clearly enough in the cartoon – anyway, not clearly enough for Doug. Let me run through how the referral model will work.

1) You don’t have to offer a referral fee if you don’t want to. You can just use StepRep to monitor and manage your online reputation – for free – and ignore all the extra features.

2) You set the amount of the referral fee. We don’t know how big your business is. You could be peddling fifty-cent shoelaces or million-dollar yachts. Only you know how large a fee you’re prepared to offer.

3) The fee is split 50/50 between the new customer and the referring customer. That’s why I worry that the term “referral fee” might be confusing (and if you have a better phrase, get in touch with me). Really what you’re offering is a referral fee plus a discount.

–and most importantly–

4) You don’t pay a dime unless you make an actual sale. It doesn’t cost you anything to offer a referral fee, and if no-one takes you up on the offer, that’s okay, you can just go on promoting your business the old-fashioned way – radio ads, coupons in the mail, paying some kid to dress up as a giant cheeseburger and stand on the street corner waving.

The referral fees won’t be coming along for another few months. Hopefully by the time this feature is ready, we’ll have a better sense of how to get the idea across to new users. Meanwhile, thanks for the feedback, Doug.