Astroturfing - bad behaviour and potentially costly

Tuesday, 14 July 2009 08:37

’Lifestyle Lift’ Will Pay $300,000 in Penalties and Costs to New York State. (Thanks to Matt Cutts for the tweet on this).

A plastic surgery provider was caught (and done) for publishing fake positive consumer reviews online.

Many an ethically challenged marketeer or black-hat SEOer have probably tried this and called it 'smart marketing'. But "Astroturfing" which Wikipedia defines as "formal political advertising or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous grassroots behavior" was described by New York's Attorney General as fraud and illegal - not to mention cynical and manipulative. Go the legislators!!

Apparently the company decided to control negative messages about the company - dooh! How about you improve your product and services instead. And you could be upfront about how you are solving any problems.   The cost to the company in terms of negative PR is probably much greater than the 300k fine.

Many businesses publish customer testimonials on their websites, which naturally are going to be positive.   If you do this, make sure they are genuine.    If you provide a customer forum, accept all comments (barring those that don't comply to standard forum rules) and take the opportunity to show people how you have gone about rectifying any  problems or faults.  And make sure you use the feedback to improve your products and processes - complaints are a great source of information about what is not working for your customers!

And if you are going to write commentary or product review pieces about your own business - make sure you include and appropriate disclaimer .

There is another side to this of course, and that is negative public outrage and comment stirred up by political parties that exploit citizen ignorance and emotions - but that's a story for another time (and someone else's blog!)