How Common Are Fake Reviews?How Common Are Fake Reviews?

The folks over at The Daily Background have been working overtime to publicize the problems with companies generating positive buzz about their products through astroturfing. It started with Belkin fake reviews; now some Carbonite glowing reviews have been unmasked.The Belkin incident started when someone noticed a brazen request on the Amazon Mechanical Turk site asking for workers to write positive reviews of Belkin products. That person was an employee of Belkin. When people started digging deeper, they found a second Belkin employee who was posting positive reviews directly. Those, of course, were the ones who were not clever enough to cover their tracks. Since the Belkin incident was such a perfect example of astroturfing at its worst, I propose a new term for companies that pay people to write fake reviews: Belkinization.

The latest story is about Carbonite, an online backup service, but it's actually from an incident back in 2006. Some Carbonite employees posted fake reviews on Amazon. It wasn't until September of last year that a commenter on a New York Times blog pointed out the fake reviews. Those glowing faux-reviews weren't actually removed from Amazon until last week.

I wonder, however, if there is anything that can be done about the Belkinization of product ratings and reviews. Peer feedback can make a big difference in whether someone buys a product or not, which gives companies a strong incentive to game the system to improve their own results. Look at how companies game their search rankings; despite the efforts of companies like Google, it's possible to get better position without being a better page.

The approach I've been taking is to treat the critical reviews much more credibly than the glowing ones, particularly when they are pointing to the same set of problems. And of course, whenever possible solicit reviews from immediate friends and business associates rather than Internet strangers.