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Companies paying people to say good things about their products on forums
mouser:
recent blog post about bloggers getting paid to say nice things:
http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/006175.html
Paid Product Evangelist that hide they are getting Paid
I have a friend that is a pretty popular blogger, and I asked him today why he had been talking about a certain product so much. He confided in me that he was being paid to be a product evangelist. When I told him that I had never heard him disclose that he was getting paid to evangelize the product he said that his contract had forbid him from disclosing this.
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zridling:
Man I wish people would pay me to say the nice things I do about some of the software on my site, but that's exactly why I don't. I'd be like every other whore and take the money and write the glitter. What's worse than saying nice things about crappy software?
Oh yeah I forgot, this is it.
PS: Hirudin — tell us more, don't leave us hanging!
mitzevo:
When you narrow it down basically all it is, is a job. Do the job, get your pay (in what ever form).
People work to make money, so they do the job. This happens to be a very good job (that benifits companies alot).. and it goes on all over the place, not to mention all the techniques involved, like brainwashing.. influence... ;)
Other than that I found this topic a good 10minutes of reading =D
app103:
Here is a case where a company (Sprint) didn't get the great praise they had hoped for with the free phones they were giving away to bloggers:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/19b.html
Over the last six months, Sprint has been trying to get bloggers (like me) to write about their new Power Vision Network by sending us free phones and letting us download music and movies and use the phones for free.
That’s rather nice of them, but honestly, I have a really strong aversion to writing about things just because some PR person wanted me to. Basically, there’s no better way to make me not want to write about something than to ask me to write about it. I accepted the free phone because, gosh, well, it’s a free phone, but I decided that I simply wouldn’t write about it no matter how much I liked it.
As it turns out, I had the opposite problem. The phone they sent me, an LG Fusic, is really quite awful, and the service, Power Vision, is tremendously misconceived and full of dumb features that don’t work right and cost way too much. So I’m going to review the dang phone anyway, even though if anybody from Sprint is paying attention they’re going to lose their lunch and some executive bonehead over there is going to go nuts and I sincerely hope that this doesn’t put an end to the entire free-phones-for-bloggers boondoggle, because I’d hate to get beaten up at Etech next year by all the other bloggers who would hate me for spoiling all the fun.
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When it finally arrived, the physical appearance of the phone was rather disappointing. If you’ve been spoiled by Motorola’s latest phones, or the seamless, screwless, elegant iPod, the LG Fusic will strike you as butt-ugly. Where a Motorola RAZR has a solid case made out of almost sensual matte-black steel that just feels great, the LG Fusic is made out of the cheapest kind of gray plastic, the same material you find on a $3 toy. Where Motorola goes to great lengths to hide the screws, and minimize bumps and seams, the LG Fusic has dozens of ugly protuberances, gaps, holes, screws, seams, etc. Worst of all, the LG Fusic has no less than three of those evil, flimsy, rubbery plug-caps that are connected to the phone by the thinnest of filaments. You know, those stupid rubber plugs that you have to pull away to plug anything into the phone, and then they just dangle there like chicken wattles (when they’re not getting in the way of the thing you’re trying to plug in) for a couple of weeks until they finally tear off. The phone is almost twice as thick as a RAZR. It comes with a break-offable front plate which can be used to change the accent color of the very front of the phone. Your choices are Barbie Pink, Barbie Green, Barbie Blue, and Black which would be the only stylish choice, if only it didn’t clash so badly with the rest of the phone. (Believe me, it is hard to make black clash with anything, but LG did it.) Overall this phone seriously looks like a Fisher Price toy, not a top-of-the-line cell phone.
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Read the full review...it gets even better. ;D
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/19b.html
dmd:
I really dont post here much but I should as I feel this is one of the better forums that I visit.
I am involved in Internet Marketing you know the guys you make fun of sometimes. I run into this crap all the time and it gives many marketers a bad name. I sometimes outsource work from places like script lance and elance etc. and I constantly see jobs posted for things just like this, I have a friend who is a writer trying to write that All American Novel and basicaly was going broke in the process. Finaly his wife told him to either start making some money or get out (hehehe) He asked me for some help so I told him that many people are always looking for ghost writers and sent him to some of the freelancing sites. Anyways to make a long story short one of the jobs he had found was a Company was paying $2.00 a blog post to glorify their product. He did this for a while because he is the type of guy that needs instant gratification and found it easier than researching and writing ebooks. He asked me what I thought and I told him that I felt he was contributing to the trash that you find on the internet offering you to make 3000 - 5000.00 weekly. I am not sure what he is doing now as far as work because everytime I tried to show him something it wasnt good enough and wanted to make money today. He is basicaly lazy that way as he wants all the glory without putting in the work.
Sorry I went off track here but, this is more common than you think, and is becoming part of SEO. There are companies that are paying people to post at forums just to gain the one way link. Even if they say something crappy about the product and start a controversial discusssion, The company recieves the advantage of increased traffic from the forum post and the search engines pick up on it often resulting in a higher PR for the page that is the original posters sig file.
Dennis
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