Social Spark!

I have a problem with Social Spark! Well, not really Social Spark itself but with the way assignments are given out. I’ve been with Social Spark (let’s just call them SS for short) for quite a while now, ever since the day they first launched their service.

And to be fair, I enjoyed doing work for them. I was happy with what they had to offer and I was happy with the way they offered it. True, I had to book assignments and then wait in queue to see if they would be given to me or not. More often than not, I would get the chance to do them.

Now, when I’m given an assignment, I don’t just simply do them. I try to relate that particular assignment to a real part of my life. After all it’s only fair to the advertiser since they’re paying me to do it. I don’t give them shoddy work and I made a little money from them.

But now, in fact the past couple of months, ever since they revamped their site with certain new features and updates, the assignments I get have practically dried up. Now, I have no issues with that cos the advertiser is not obligated to give me assignments just cos I booked them.

And on the very few occasions that I do get a reservation reserved email telling me that I have successfully obtain a reservation and that I have 12 hours to do it, I am of course ecstatic. But imagine to my utter disappointment, when I log into the assignment details, though the assignment is there for me to do, I cannot select a blog to do it on.

So, what do I do? I send a ticket to customer love and yes, they do reply but what I’m not satisfied is the reply given. Here, read are some of the things they had to say:

First, this may an issue with the way the Opp. is segmented. Basically what happens is that while you met the segmentation requirements of the Opp. when you queued for a reservation, you were right on the edge of being eligible.

By the time that you were ready to submit your post, enough blogs that more closely met the requirements had been added to the system so that your blog was no longer eligible and therefore not able to submit your post.

It can also be a simple reporting issue. When the system resets every midnight, it updates stats and rankings which in turn updates Opp. eligibility and availability. So, if there is ever a glitch in the script or your site is temporarily unavailable when the script runs, this will affect your Opps. for the next 24 hours.

Please remember that the system checks that you meet all the requirements when you add yourself to queue for a reservation, but the queue does NOT check whether or not you are still eligible, if you have already posted for the advertiser or if you can still post for the day when it sends out reservations. It only "knows" that there is a slot open and you are next in line.

I find that a little too bitter to swallow. I can understand if my blog doesn’t meet the qualifications. I can understand if I queue and don’t get the assignment but what irks me is that when I actually get the assignment, apparently I’m on the brink of qualification or there was an update from the time I got the reservation and the time I actually did the assignment which was still within the stipulated 12 hours.

If that is the case why even bother giving me 12 hours and even telling me not to forget to wash behind my ears even and then say that I don’t qualify cos after their internal update, my blog requirements don’t meet they approval. Come on you guys at SS, that’s not something I can buy.

Shouldn’t it be that once I am given the reservation (I stress the word ‘given’ here), whether my blog qualifies (which I think it does) or not within the stipulated 12 hours, I SHOULD be allowed to do the assignment. That’s what the 12 hour period is for, I presume. To give us bloggers a chance to look at the assignment and come up with a worthy enough post for the said assignment.

Imagine this scenario, what if I wrote the post but then, just as I am about to submit, I can’t select my blog cos within that 12 hour period there was an update at SS and I suddenly didn’t qualify anymore or maybe I was on the brink of qualification again. It can be quite disappointing when that happens. And it’s happened to me quite a lot.

As it is, I don’t really get all that many assignments from SS these days so whatever I do get, I jump at the chance to do them and when this happens, well, it sucks. Isn’t there some way you guys at SS can make this right? Take for instance your sister site, Pay Per Post. If you reserve an assignment there, as long as you do it within the stipulated 6 hours, the assignment is yours for the taking. There is no such thing as not being qualified once you reserve the assignment.

Why can’t SS work along those lines? Let me be frank. I like doing work for Social Spark. Especially so when you guys first launched. Things were so much simpler then. Look for assignment, book assignment and if you’re lucky, the assignment will be given to you and as long as I post it within the 12 hour time frame, all is fine.

I hope you guys don’t deactivate my account just cos I wrote a post here complaining about your system. But I cannot stop you if you want to do that anyway. Just consider this constructive criticism from one of your members who enjoy doing work for you. I thought you guys were really cool when you first launched but now, I’m not so sure.

While I do appreciate your replies to my ticket complaining about this, I just cannot buy all the reasons given and hope that my complain here does merit a little further looking into the way your system checks a bloggers qualifications before assigning an assignment to them so that once given, the said assignment should be able to be completed as long as it falls within the stipulated 12 hour time frame.

With that said and done, I hope things will improve for the better soon.