Prostituting the last bastion of honesty in business: Paying others to write your praise...for a lousy $5.

It was just a matter of time before you knew it was going to come to this--but it's finally here in full bloom:  Paid "testimonials"--paid by on-line companies--to get professional writers to become paid hypsters.  The concept of paying somebody else to "advertise" your wares is far from new; but having them pass for an unbiased, disinterested, off-the-sidewalk consumer is relatively new to the business, at least in it's current potential pervasiveness.  

In one sense this is nothing different from hiring an "ad man"--that's done all the time, since the beginning of time!  But testimonials have historically been thought to be so powerful, so effective because they reflect--by definition--the honest, true endorsement of an unbiased party; but that's all changing.  

The problem is more blatant than you think.

There are small operators like the one who, for a mere $5, promised that "I will submit two great reviews for your business," as advertised by an enterprising soul on Fiverr.  

There are others even more audacious:  The technology gadget company, Belkin, was caught soliciting only five-star ratings for it's Amazon-promoted offerings which, when this became a public matter, had endorsements that ran on for 15 pages of perfect scores by ostensibly "ordinary" customers.  Engadget reported the story and ran a copy of the blatant call for endorses by Belkin on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. 

A fake testimonial detector anybody?

The big on-line firms are finally waking up to the subtle and slow-but-real harm that such practices are having in the marketspace that they pioneered--and which in the early days they once enjoyed a valuable franchise, as being a place where real people shared real feedback.  There's even an emerging industry to see if there can't be developed the reverse equivalent of search engine optimization--but to detect fake-from-real testimonials!

In every walk of life there are devious people, those who work to bend and break the rules the rest of us mostly expect them to play by.  And, lets face it, the "advertising business" has never been a place that was thought to be a bastion of unquestioned, unbiased truth-telling; indeed, it's been quite the opposite.  But just when one might have thought that it couldn't get worse, well, it looks like it has.  
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Follow Keith's biz blog on Twitter for updates and see more of what he's reading about on his Facebook Page. If you are inclined, you can write him at kmurray@bryant.edu.