SlashGear Japan
Belkin has managed to find themselves in the middle of a public relations fiasco as they are being accused of hiring people to write fake ratings and reviews of their products on many online shopping websites. This comes shortly after posting on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site, which offers a thing called “artificial intelligence.”
This means that companies can pay small amounts of money to people in exchange for performing very repetitive tasks such as when Belkin’s Mike Bayard asking for people to write a positive five star review for their products. In exchange for 65 US cents (44p) people will write a review for the Belkin product as if they had owned it and give the best possible rating. None of these people own or use any of the products they are asked to rate.
This process of boosting the user popularity of a particular product is called “astroturfing.” While it is not a new way of gaining reputation, such a large company has never been so outright open about participating in such behavior. In defense of their actions, business development representative “Bayard” has “created dozens of jobs on the Mechanical Turk site.” Since the news of Belkin’s actions all of the job requests have been deleted for the Mechanical Turk website with no official statement from the company.
4 Responses to “Belkin hiring people to rate their products 5 stars?”
John January 19, 2009
I have owned a few belkin products – I have never owned one I would rate more than one star – no wonder they are paying people – although, from my experiences with them, it does suprise me a little. Their product build is always so cheap, I am suprised that they actually pay cash for this.
Maybe they could put the money into half way decent products? Theres an idea!
+1Justin Bailey January 19, 2009
Not surprising. When you make shit products that you can’t even give away you might as well just spend that money on paying for reputation.
+2Gino January 19, 2009
Why hasn’t Mike Bayard been fired already ?
Is it possible that there were other Belkin employees involved ? Was Bayard acting on his own initiative or was he directed by his superiors ?
Is Belkin just grossly mismanaging the public relations, concering an ethics violation by one rogue employee, or is this symptomatic of a deeper cover-up ?
+1wilksmojo January 29, 2009
Hey, if you can’t make descent products, you probably are sufficiently inept to also hire bad PR people and fuck up your ad campaigns, too.
NeutralWitness the downward spiral!