Surprise! Review Fraud is coming
Looks like Belkin was caught cheating on a couple of reviews on Amazon.com. This is hardly surprising - every good thing on the Internet has been infected with commercial interest - email, Google Search, blogs, twitter, etc etc.
I would argue that Belkin is probably one of the thousands and thousands of companies trying to control what’s happening on the blogosphere, twitter or your favorite retail site. Everybody in retail — everybody — is worried about what user Joe or Jane might say on her Facebook profile about a particular product. For me, multiple questions.
1. What’s cheating? Or rather, where do we draw the line? Some things are OK, but others not. It’s OK to spam all your friends begging for a vote when your bozo Web 2.0 company is nominated for the International Nerds award, but not OK to ask your friends to leave a good review on Amazon.com for a product. Not sure I see the difference.
2. Why are we so naive? Everybody I talk to in the space is intensely focused on Social Media. It is on everybody’s radar, with big marketing budgets allocated to establishing a presence on all the emerging Web 2.0 plaftorms. We, as users, are already been played - take for example Twitter and compare what Twitter is now with what it was a year ago.
3. Who will win in the end? Long term, all the lobbying and influencing is a monumental waste of time. Don’t waste your time trying to buy an extra half star on an Amazon product review. Fix your product. Think long term.
