Belkin and Carbonite get caught scamming social media
We’re always clear in our workshops and briefings: always encourage your customers to participate on-line, provide feedback and – hopefully – leave glowing reviews on social media sites where others can find them. Never leave your own reviews about your products and services, and especially don’t pretend to be a genuine customer. You’re likely to be found out, despite the huge numbers of reviews posted on-line.
Belkin, a major manufacturer of computer equipment, has been caught with its virtual pants down, after inviting people to write five star reviews of their products for cash – even if they don’t own it. “Write as if you own the product and are using it”, said the Belkin advert.
Belkin certainly needed the help: real social media reviews of the product included comments like
“Does not work with Mac OS X despite product description”, “loaded with Bugs, goes on and off whenever it feels like” and “Don’t buy it. Don’t. Seriously. Don’t”.
Compounding its sins, Belkin asked its army of paid reviewers to mark such reviews as “not helpful”.
Unfortunately, blog site Daily Background picked up on the scam and – too late – there’s an internal enquiry ongoing. “We will work earnestly to regain the trust we have lost” wrote Belkin in a statement. They’ll have their work cut out. Who will trust a positive review of their product now?
Daily Background also has revealed that Carbonite has been posting fake reviews too, calling into question the trust that both its current and future customers hold. For a backup company, trust is everything.
Blogger Bruce Goldensteinberg found that their product failed to work, made worse by a customer service nightmare. He wondered how others found the product: then found a number of suspicious reviews all giving Carbonite five stars, amongst other “real” reviews criticising the company. The poster of a favourable review? Swami Kumaresan, Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite. Another was posted by their Senior Software Engineer . Read more about this latest social media scandal.
If you find your business is getting bad reviews, don’t mess with social media. Instead, post management comments if there was a genuine mistake. If it’s appropriate, take the bad review on the chin and improve the service or lower expectations. Otherwise, a bad situation could become very grave indeed.
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The nature of social media is that it’s primarily affected by relationships, and not volume. It’s about maintaining a good signal-to-noise ratio in your content.
If you try to game the system, your message will eventually become nothing but background noise.
So I wouldn’t be too concerned.
At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. And the only people who fall for something like this are the ones who want to get something for free.
This is a classic big company approach to its customers clearly the product was not fit for purpose. So rather than acknowledge the problems and withdraw the product n fix it. They chose to bluff it out by buying good PR. Prior to social media this strategy might have worked.
It shows a total lack of understanding for this new media and disrespect for their customers. I wonder how they will put this PR disaster behind them. Every time there is a review or new product launch someone will remind us that they tried to fudge last time.