The Daily Background
| I’m waiting for an official comment from Belkin
by Arlen Parsa
Update: Belkin’s President has responded to this report here.
I just put in a call to Belkin’s PR chief, Melody Chalaban regarding my piece about Belkin’s online sales rep paying people to write false reviews of their products. I hope to find out whether or not it is an official company policy to hire people to write fake reviews, or if the employee who is doing it is acting on his own and paying people out of his own pocket.
I’ll post updates whenever warranted.
Update: After my original item was published, Amazon.com has quietly deleted four recent (and presumably fake) five star reviews of one of the Belkin products that Mr Bayard was paying people 65 cents to review positively. We’ll see what else happens.
Update 2: The plot thickens. Here’s a bit more info I’ve found out. As recently as January 9th, according to a Google cache from that day, this router was listed at 216 dollars, with an average rating of less than two stars. All of a sudden around the same time that Mr Bayard started his activities, the price dropped to just $69, a reduction of $150 (second Google cache).
What does this mean? It looks like this thing wasn’t selling well and was way over-priced (were they making over $150 of profit on it?), so Mr Bayard lowered the price dramatically and started paying people to post positive reviews of it. Still, this wasn’t a one-time-only deal however, as his requests for similar astroturfing for different products on other websites indicates…
Update 3: We’ll learn more relatively soon, I’m told.
Update 4: Mr Bayard’s LinkedIn profile has mysteriously disappeared. You can view a screenshot I saved of it from yesterday night here.
[…] Update 3: See the latest on this here. […]
Great job bringing Belkin’s apparent astroturfing campaign to light.
Unfortunately, I suspect it’s only the tip of the iceberg — for many other companies’ products, and not just on Amazon.
Good investigative work! What ridiculous company ethics from Belkin.
Hi Arlen, thanks for the excellent investigative reports! I just wanted to point out that the device you are calling a router has nothing to do with routers, and would be called a wireless USB hub if it worked properly. In this case it appears that it should just be called ‘junk’.
Also, Amazon doesn’t manually remove reviews 99% of the time, they get automatically hidden after being ‘reported’ X number of times in a certain time period. Those reviews just disappeaered due to the influx of traffic and subsequent reports submitted by your readers.
To post an Amazon review, users must have purchased the item from Amazon with an Amazon account–so I question the validity of this without further details.
Jeff, you only have to purchase AN item from Amazon to review something. You don’t have to buy the item in question. I bought a textbook on Amazon and have reviewed several things since- including the 80GB PS3, which I did NOT buy from Amazon.
That google cache thing isn’t useful; notice that the second (cheaper) page was listed in small print as being from a third-party reseller.
Nice investigation you conducted there!
Great work Arlen!,
I’ve bookedmarked your site.
Looking forward to similar type of articles in the future,
and of course an update on the current situation.
[…] There is still no official statement, so let’s take everything with a grain of salt. But if it is true, this could turn into a major problem for Belkin. I found the story this morning via Lummaland and it is already making its rounds on Digg, Techmeme et al. There is also a lot of Twitter chatter about it. Arlen contacted the Belkin PR people himself and is now waiting for an official reaction… […]
I’m just so glad you found out about this and are trying to get something done to bring it to light and get some answers from Belkin. Can’t wait to see how it’ll turn out, though I’d not be surprised if Belkin just remains mute on the entire fiasco.
Read the full note from Belkin’s President Mark Reynoso below released January 18th
His linkedin Profile is still there, just not as public anymore (LinkedIn allows you to finely control your profile’s degree of privacy). Reports of it disappearing from LinkedIn are premature.
If you are a LinkedIn member you can still see it. If you are in his “network” (3 or fewer connections away), you can maybe see his full profile. I am not in his network, but I still see this:
Michael Bayard
Business Development Representative at Belkin
Location
Greater Los Angeles Area
Industry
Consumer Electronics
Current
* Business Development Representative at Belkin International, Inc.
* Business Development for eCommerce at Belkin
Past
* Inside Sales Representative at Cenveo
* Sales Consultant at MacSuperstore
Education
* California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
Connections
68 connections
The wireless USB router in question is basically obsolete, so its price reduction has something to do with that. Other companies are now selling more capable, cheaper, newer versions of wireless USB (although I still think the benefits are rather overstate relative to cost–wireless USB just needs to be built into peripherals and computers to make it worthwhile, if that happens).
If you are a LinkedIn member, you can still see Mr. Bayard’s profile:
http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=19734266
We still don’t know if he’s been running a rogue operation or whether it goes higher up. I’m sure there’s a lot of political maneuvering going on at Belkin right now. Stay tuned.
Sadly this sort of behaviour doesn’t seem unusual. There’s a hotel in the UK that I have stayed at that is probably the worst hotel in the country. Yet on TripAdvisor there are many glowing reviews, interspersed with some real stinkers. I suspect the stinkers are from real guests and the rest are fakes, particularly because the positive reviews tend to be similar and tend to emphasize the same points repeatedly. e.g. most of them mention the breakfast, sutiability for a wedding and the leisure facilities, always in the same order, always in the same terms. If one posts a negative review of the hotel it is rapidly marked as “unhelpful”.
Belkin’s president says that the company has taken “steps” to rectify the situation. But unbelievably, those steps don’t include firing the guy who did this.
You know, not every professional screwup needs to result in being fired. Why does everyone always call for somebody’s job–even in situations where they have not been personally affected. And–face it–unless you bought that router from Amazon based on those reviews–you weren’t affected. “But we all suffer when someone lies like this” you might whine. Yes, that’s true. But the nice thing is, especially these days, it’ll get found out and exposed.
Should the guy face a pay cut? Demotion? Passed up for the next promotion? Ethics training? Reassignment? Sure. But lose his job? That’s a bit much.
Hi, I must agree with “Anon, on January 17th, 2009 at 8:40 pm ” who points out that this is indeed concerning a Wireless USB Hub, not some kind of router. Considering the fact that this is one of the ‘lower value’ devices being produced by Belkin right now, I wouldn’t assume that it ‘goes much further up’. Surely, as with most companies, they would take a flagship product and promote that (in a dubious way). This would be the same as Microsoft trying to push Live Messenger, instead of promoting their new operating system. But still, this is indeed conduct unbecoming of a ‘professional’, and I think he (Mike) should be transferred to a remote part of the antarctic region in his underwear for an indefinite period.
@ Matt:
“You know, not every professional screwup needs to result in being fired. …Should the guy face a pay cut? Demotion? Passed up for the next promotion? Ethics training? Reassignment? Sure. But lose his job? That’s a bit much.”
A fair enough point, but the problem is with the violation of consumer trust, and Mr. Reynoso’s initial letter is inadequate in that it essentially says:
We got caught and our actions are:
#1: remove the transgression
#2: perform more ‘CYA’
What it failed to say was that they were initiating an internal investigation into the matter.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that Belkin has since followed-up on their pressroom webpage, and stated that they are conducting an internal investigation. So far, there’s two daily updates (1/21, 1/22 … we’ll see if there will be another one today), so it does IMO appear that Belkin top leadership is taking this very seriously.
You can be sure that Belkin is keeping track of web hits on this one, so I’d recommend that readers continue to give them hits to the relevant pages and updated links, to remind them that the public is indeed keeping track of this one.
-hh
Thanks for investigating! Not everyone would do that and publish it….
Just found this: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-02-01
[…] Thanks to commenter Iris for pointing this […]
What really amazes me about all of this, is that he (and whoever else might be involved) really thought they could get away with this bit of underhanded ethics.
You’d think, being involved with the computer industry, and with computer communications in particular, that he’d realize how transparent the web/internet really is.
I muse be naive, because I find it really amazing that someone supposedly intelligent enough to handle a higher position of responsibility in a company could be so stupid!!!!
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