It's common for your favourite e-commerce website to have reviews of products. In fact, consumers are increasingly using reviews and other user-generated content to make their purchase decisions. As a result, social commerce has become a critical asset to e-commerce.
Consumers trust friends and strangers more than they trust traditional advertising. In fact, consumer ratings and reviews have proved to be one of the most successful social techniques in delivering a clear return on investment. Your business is eager to explore the power of consumer opinions to attract and engage new customers. Perhaps you've already implemented ratings and reviews software on your site.
A comedy subculture has grown up around Amazon’s open, unverified review system, in which people compete to write the strangest, funniest fake reviews of the more unusual products sold on the site.
The funny fake review meme isn't restricted to Amazon, but is possible on any site using open, passive review collection: open systems allow anyone to write a review without verification that they own the product, and a passive system means the trend can easily go viral.
The recent launch of Samsung’s new generation of tablet computer has been overshadowed by accusations of astroturfing.
The controversy centres around video testimonials of the "true-life stories" of average people who test drove the Galaxy Tab tablet PC. The video reviews struck a lot of watchers as wooden and, with very little digging, it was soon discovered that the people in the video are actors, not the journalists or CEOs they’re claimed to be.
In all the discussion around the newest ASA code regulating the promotional use of social media and user generated content, we’ve been surprised that so few people have brought up the existing regulations in this area.
We’ve seen brands getting their staff to write fake positive reviews of their products. We’ve seen people slating their competitors in reviews. We’ve seen people outsourcing their review faking via Mechanical Turk or similar sites.
But David Friedman of Ironic Sans seems to have discovered an entirely new kind of astroturfing.
New regulations come into force today that bring online marketing messages under the Advertising Standards Agency’s remit. We’ve known about this for a while, but last week it was revealed that the ASA now considers user generated content on social networks and on brands’ websites to be within the scope of the updated code.