Belkin Buying Good Reviews

January 19th, 2009 by Nick Gonzalez

As we know, online reviews have shown to be some of the most effective ways to affect purchasing behavior. So, naturally the impulse is to drive more business by driving more positive reviews. For one employee at Belkin, this took an all too direct meaning. CrunchGear discovered a member of the Belkin Bizdev team was buying positive reviews for their products on major review sites.

Here’s the post in plain text:

“Positive review writing.

* Use your best possible grammar and write in US English only
* Always give a 100% rating (as high as possible)
* Keep your entry between 25 and 50 words
* Write as if you own the product and are using it
* Tell a story of why you bought it and how you are using it
* Thank the website for making you such a great deal
* Mark any other negative reviews as “not helpful” once you post yours

Instructions:

The link below leads to a product on a website. Read-through the product’s features and write a positive review for it using the guidelines above to the best of your ability. I have also provided the part number for this product and you can click on the links below to see it on several alternative websites. In order to post some reviews you will need to create an account on the site. You can use your own email address or open a new free webmail account (gmail, yahoo…) and use it to post with.”

I can’t stress enough how bad an idea this is, not only because you can get caught, but because it undermines the authenticity of review sites. Definitely black hat.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.