A spot on the “Best Posts of the Month” list has been reserved for Rae’s rant on Merchant Circle today, and the goofy way Merchant Circle does business. Rae covers a lot — but not all — of the issues many have had with Merchant Circle for some time now.

Rae really lets them have it over the fact that Merchant Circle lets businesses delete user reviews it doesn’t like. And this isn’t new. Merchant Circle started bragging about this back in December. Crazy, isn’t it? I still think a small business should claim its listing on Merchant Circle’s site (because if you don’t, someone else might). But beyond that, nothing.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you can probably name Merchant Circle’s biggest claim to fame: That really bad “marketing campaign” which involved Merchant Circle calling up small businesses with a warning that someone had just reviewed their business on Merchant Circle’s web site.

That was last September, and we reported a week later that Merchant Circle was putting an end to those phone calls.

But did they start it up again? Two weeks ago, Greg Sterling shared a comment posted on his blog in which the business owner claims to have just received another such phone call.

Kevin, MC’s “Community Relations” guy (who also writes on their blog), is registered and able to comment here on SBS. So I’ll invite him to let us know if that calling campaign has started up again, and if not, what is that business owner on Greg Sterling’s blog talking about? Kevin?

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