Companies paying people to say good things about their products on forums

[housetier]

This is just in on TechCrunch:

Reverb Communications is an extremely successful PR firm that claims to have “first party” and “personal” relationships with Apple.
(...)
Unfortunately, they don’t always follow the rules, and they have been stupid enough to tell that to prospective clients.

-http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/08/22/cheating-the-app-store-pr-firm-has-interns-post-positive-reviews-for-clients/

It is a nice long article but still seems unfinished: there is a lonely closing "div" tag at the end and we never get to read their response to Reverb's response. I hope they'll fix that soon.

In the meantime: read it

[app103]

A communications manager at DeLonghi caught writing 5-star reviews for high-end DeLonghi products on Amazon.com. DeLonghi's official statement admits it and defends it. The company thinks there is nothing wrong with it.

http://blogs.wsj.com...n-fake-amazon-raves/

[olla86]

Very interesting,app103! But I think it is not OK...

[bleh75]

Should this be a surprise? Given the amount of 'advertising' on the internet theses days (and the depths that some of these 'advertisers' will plumb) I would be very surprised if any possible method is not being exploited openly and covertly.

Add to that the large web-factions that have gotten 'religion' when it comes to browser wars, operating system, platform etc. then almost anything printed on a webpage should be taken with a pinch of salt!

-Carol Haynes (February 06, 2006, 09:38 AM)

Well said 

[petertech]

For me it is no surprise. Today where large companies spend millions of dollars in advertising, and did not look at ways to attract new customers. Not only are these two corporations that pay for people to say wonders of their products in the specialty forums, there certainly a lot more.
Sugerir uma tradução melhor.

[mark1959]

This kind of stuff is on the increase and pretty widespread already.

few years back I'd always look around for reviews on just about anything I was looking to buy. These days I discount almost all of them except if they're on one site that I trust.