Carbonite Stacks the Deck With 5-Star Reviews

The Narrative Fallacy writes "In the aftermath of disclosures that Belkin employees paid users for good reviews on Amazon, David Pogue reports in the NYTimes that Carbonite has gone one better with 5-star reviews of its online backup services written by its own employees. Pogue recounts how Bruce Goldensteinberg signed up for the backup service, and all went well until his computer crashed and he was unable to restore it from the online backup while Carbonite customer support kept him on hold for over an hour. Frustrated, Goldensteinberg started reading Carbonite reviews on Amazon and a few of them seemed suspicious. 'They were created around the same date — October 31, 2006 — all given 5 stars, and the reviewers all came from around the Boston, MA area, where Carbonite is located,' including a review by Swami Kumaresan that read more like a testimonial. 'It turned out that Swami Kumaresan is the Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite. His review gives no indication that he is employed by the company.' Another review posted by Jonathan F. Freidin extols Carbonite without mentioning Freidin's position as Senior Software Engineer at Carbonite. 'It doesn't matter to me that Carbonite's fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old,' writes Pogue. 'These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed.'"

Comments

Oh man, I worked in a company that did this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man, I worked in a company that did this all the time - positive reviews submitted by employees of the company on various sites, posing as customers of the company. It is a successful and respected online company.

The culture of a place can go a long way to convincing employees that this is the normal thing to do, and that it's just a part of doing business in this competitive world. Brings to mind Stanley Milgram's obediance experiments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Many fake reviews are easy to spot

[rolfwind]

Just click on the reviewer and see if they have reviewed anything else and if they have, if it's a diverse range of stuff. I remember seeing a set of self-help books get either really poor reviews or really great ones. I clicked on the 5 star reviews and many of the reviewers were either one time reviewers, or they had a history of favorably reviewing a small circle of self-help books from a specific publisher or author. Often within a tight timeframe rather than anything spaced out between reviews.

I'm sure the reverse is true in circumstances, competing manufacturers giving their competitors' products a poor review. With the same tell-tale signs.

Amazon is very attractive to scam in this fashion although I'm sure sites like epinions and others are becoming targets as well. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if there are much more sophisticated systems in place than the ones uncovered lately with Belkin and all. What we have been seeing seems all very amateurish - and considering that, after price, having a good star rating at one of these sites may bring in or cost thousands of sales - I would think some manufacturers have to have departments hired to fill the internet with favorable reviews on amazon and other sites, as well as writing blogs or recommendations on blogs with some amount of finesse. Where their employees actually become believeable characters with a bit of history and diversity - perhaps reviewing the other odd item here and there, just enough to be convincing. In fact, they could make put these characters on file and have them become year long projects that become bit reoccuring players in the marketing process.

Re:Many fake reviews are easy to spot

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Amazon is very attractive to scam in this fashion...

If Amazon is so attractive to scamming, how about some counter-examples? Can anyone suggest a site whose reviews they really trust?

I can think of two. First is cpap.com. Sometime after delivery, they send a couple of reminders asking you to rate the products you bought. Since these are durable medical goods whose performance directly and significantly impacts the lives of the users, we tend to want to say what we think, good or bad. I find the reviews on that site very trustworthy, assuming several are posted and you take the time to read them all.

Next up is Newegg.com. For items with a number of reviews, reading all of them is a darn useful thing. I tend to select the option to read all the reviews and then put them in "worst first" order. Often, an item will get a bad review because of a small percentage of DOAs or if it has some particular flaw that may not apply to me. In those cases, I can ignore the bad reviews and purchase with confidence. Generally, lots of reviews == reviews you can trust, but even the products with just a few reviews can, depending on the quality of the reviews, be successfully differentiated. As an added plus, newegg gives me a fun place to watch fanbois rant and rave.

As a postscript, I've been burned in the oddest venues, too. I once watched a conversation develop on a small web site devoted to an arcane shooting sport. Someone said they had specially adapted carrying cases to sell and posted a picture. Someone else chimed in and said they had bought one and loved it. A few were sold and over the course of the next few weeks, a half-dozen people (all known to me, all people I would run into at meatspace gatherings eventually) posted nice comments. So - I ponied up $65 for one. I would have been willing to pay double for high quality. What I got was something I wouldn't have paid $20 for if I had been able to see it in person. The quality of construction was merely passable. The details of the design were sloppy. I finally concluded that in this intimate setting, people were just unwilling to admit they had been (slightly) cheated. They were unwilling to call the maker out in front of his friends. They were unwilling to tell previous posters that their standards were laughably low. Instead, a sort of groupthink/let's not make any waves/we're all friends here vibe took hold and people wound up wasting money. I thought that was weird at first. Then I realized that I was consciously deciding to not post any comments since I didn't want to badmouth an "extended family in the sport" member and start some useless drama.

Funny dynamic, there.

My point, overall, is that reviews and their usefulness are both better and worse than we expect, often at the same time. Generally, the only way to know for sure if the reviews are any good is to have enough subject matter expertise that you don't need to read the reviews in the first place. Damn shame, that.

I know quite a few people that do that.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a normal operating procedure.My ex-boss asked me to make a 5 star rating for him on one site because his legit (if not state-of-the art) anti-spyware program was listed as an adware/spyware provider.

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/pcsafe.com

Take a look at the comments. The users "johnatsearching" and "wright" are the from the guy that owns the company. Looking back, he must have made 20 comments to bump up his rankings on the site. He even got his employees into it.

Only one person there mentioned that they were employed by the company. That's sad.

Re:Not In Good Graces Error Reporting

[SerpentMage]

I used to write books, and I hated the fact that you lived and died by the sword of Amazon. And I knew that some authors were gaming their books with better ratings.

While I am not the worlds best writer, I do feel I ok and give my readers some useful information. I don't feel that my books are a waste of money.

Having said that it hurts when your book does really well, and then it is knocked back by the competition. I had a book that hit the top rated, and it was being ranked higher than one of the competition. The competition got some reviewers out and knocked my book back.

I stopped buying at Amazon since I can get cheaper books at a1books.

Re:Not news

[mh1997]

Just last weekend I read a study that said over 80% of reviews are 4 or 5 star, not because they love the product, but because people are embarassed to say that they bought a bad product. The person with the negative experience typically either exagerates the positive or does not rate the product.