5-Star Web Reviews Going for $5

[CHR]

"A thriving industry is buying and selling rapturous reviews on the Web, and academics and businesses are looking for ways to ferret out the fakes."

Read the New York Times article here.

Linchi Kwok, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who is researching social media and the hospitality industry, explained that as Internet shopping has become more “social,” with customer reviews an essential part of the sales pitch, marketers are realizing they must watch over those opinions as much as they manage any other marketing campaign.

I'm pretty sure we all pay close attention to user reviews about our companies. We have to since they are so prominently placed in search engine results.

The Cornell researchers tackled what they call deceptive opinion spam by commissioning freelance writers on Mechanical Turk, an Amazon-owned marketplace for workers, to produce 400 positive but fake reviews of Chicago hotels. Then they mixed in 400 positive TripAdvisor reviews that they believed were genuine, and asked three human judges to tell them apart. They could not.


“We evolved over 60,000 years by talking to each other face to face,” said Jeffrey T. Hancock, a Cornell professor of communication and information science who worked on the project. “Now we’re communicating in these virtual ways. It feels like it is much harder to pick up clues about deception.”

Emphasis mine. That last sentence is really telling.. and explains why dOGs are able to make so many shoppers believe they are florists who actually deliver their orders.

Even if you get a failing grade or two, all is not lost. Dot-coms like Main Street Hub manage the reputations of small businesses for a fixed fee.

“A courteous response to a negative review can persuade the reviewer to change their reviews from two to three or four stars,” said Main Street’s chief executive, Andrew Allison. “That’s one of the highest victories a local business can aspire to with respect to their critics.”

So true. Acknowledging an issue and dealing with a negative reviewer's concerns can help redeem a business' reputation.

Right now, Google especially does a lousy job detecting fake reviews. Let's hope they hire the folks from Cornell and clear out the paid review spam that's so influential in deceiving consumers.

 

[Lizi]

I know a florist who paid his customers 5 bucks to do a review. I don't know if you would call it unethical or smart. But I think if you are paying for reviews, you will get all favorable reviews, not honest reviews. He got over 60 reviews.

Reviews can make or break a business. Fake reviews hurt everyone.

 

[shannonlovesflowers]

well- I can tell you that someone was putting fake reviews on FBML google. you can tell very easily the fake from the real..most of the real are from 2010 and a few from 2011 and most of them mention me by name. The fake ones I have a feeling are coming from flower shop network I think, not sure- but I think that's where they are coming from.

Oh and BTW- I found the fake ones very embarassing. Bettina had put a review up on Judys book and that was embarassing as well.

 

[bootcampguy]

I know many business owners who use mechanicalturk.......I almost did for SEO, but chicken out......

 

[theRKF]

I know many business owners who use mechanicalturk.......I almost did for SEO, but chicken out......

I use mTurk for repeateable, mindnumbing tasks, but I never, ever go cheap on my SEO

mTurk, Fiverr, oDesk, Elance, etc all have cheap offers for reviews, Likes, +1s and such - but you can't let that be your only source or you'll be wasting time (or worse, penalized).