Belkin have been found offering people money, to post positive comments about their products on Amazon.com! To get the money (less than a dollar per post), the fake reviewer was told to pretend they owned the product and also to mark any negative comments about Belkin’s products as “unhelpful.”
The blame for this pathetic episode, has been dumped on one employee. However, the damage caused by this story going public, is a PR nightmare for the whole company. Informationweek.com wrote a nice post about the story, including an apology by Belkin CEO Mark Reynoso. Cnet’s ‘Buzz Out Loud’ podcast made the incident their number one story today.
If nothing else, it shows how easy it is to ‘game’ reviews and why it’s always best to get your reviews from a number of trusted sources; not just one!
RT @mayhemstudios: RT @Jimconnolly Belkin paying people to write FAKE reviews!!! http://tinyurl.com/6shvas
I think a lot of ‘reviews’ on amazon are fake – a common one is where authors (or author’s agents) write reviews of their own book (see if you can spot the agent review here for instance). It’s still easy to be put off a product if it has a lot of negative reviews though.