Does this bother you?

http://www.sponsoredreviews.com/ connects advertisers with bloggers willing to write honest reviews about their services and products

Advertisers:
Announce your products, services, websites, and ideas to the world!
Tap into the power of the blogosphere to build traffic, links and valuable feedback.

Bloggers:
Earn cash by writing honest reviews about our advertiser's products and services.

Or so this companies marketing spiel goes!

What the heck! Can there be a bigger conflict of interest here? I pay you to write an “Honest Review” about me? It better be damn good cause I’m not interested in paying for negative publicity!

Now what? Like it wasn’t hard enough to keep track of and respond to all the legitimate reviews.

Am I overreacting?

It was so much easier before you had to worry about your reputation on line. You didn’t have to worry about the whole world knowing the second you screwed up.

Maybe this is a good thing. Inject cynicism and distrust into the whole citizen review process and maybe people won’t read them anymore. You won’t have to worry about those pesty little reviews anymore! In fact you can just pay people to write good ones for you. How easy is that?

But then again if people don’t trust what they read they will quite reading. Do you really want to give up your brand evangelists that are telling the word how great you are?

I personally think each and every one of us should be very vocal about denouncing these kinds of businesses and I certainly wouldn’t ever want to be caught using one! I shutter to think what the “Buzz” for that might sound like online.

What do you think?

Steve