Restaurant Social Media
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
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
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Judy "the foodie" Asman on -
Thanks for posting, Steve.
Actually this doesn't bother me so much. It looks like the site encourages bloggers to be honest, even if it's a negative review. Whether the blogger is seduced to write only positive reviews because they're getting schmoozed by the business is a totally different story.
Their style of reviews sounds no different than a company sending a product to an editor (like a tech editor receiving the latest Blackberry) in hopes he or she will write about it or a hotel or tourism organization flying in travel writers for a familiarization trip to generate media attention. That's just how businesses get attention.
But there will no doubt be a huge margin for reviews that lack integrity, particularly since the advertisers will be able to buy reviews from the bloggers. I echo what you said: "It better be damn good cause I’m not interested in paying for negative publicity!"
My conclusion is file this one under, "I was young and I needed the money."
FFT -
-
Permalink Reply by Nathan on -
I don't really have a problem with it since they expect sincere reviews. I googled "sponsored reviews" and poked around - what I saw was fairly honest, balanced commentary. I figure that I wouldn't submit my product to that program unless I was fairly confident of the results, but I could be wrong.
Also, a lot of the people who would join such a program likely discovered Google Adsense won't get them out of their day job simply because they talk about their latest vacation or family pet.
The alternative is usually NOT joining a program, becoming noticed in your niche/industry and then being personally approached by a product or service. When you are personally approached and do the review, it's usually noted that it's sponsored. -
Get Social with Us!
Advertisement
Industry News
© 2012 Created by FohBoh.
