Back in May 2009  it came to our attention at Whatswhat.ie that a UK company is calling companies on our directory.  We have over 66,000 companies listed and believe they have contacted 1,000’s to date.  This company is called Matchmaker Marketing.  There are others but Matchmaker has a vigorous campaign going on at the moment targeting Irish companies. They also use other names like Zenith Marketing, Storm Media and Sphere Marketing…to name a few. I will post more when I hear about them.

It is bad enough they are calling our customers and sometimes being detrimental about our service, however it is difficult for us to stop this as being an online business directory we are in the public domain and companies listed with us show their details in order to be seen.

The problem is that this company infers they are Google from the start of the conversation and are tricking Irish businesses into thinking they are being called by Google so the call must therefore be bona fide.

Those that know a bit better realise that Google wouldn’t be calling them direct so they ask who they actually are and they admit to being Matchmaker Marketing. However they then claim to be affiliated with Google or a Google reseller or Google’s largest reseller in the UK. “As in Carphone Warehouse is to Vodafone” (their words)