The Daily Background

Above: a fake review, written by the Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite on his own product

If there’s one thing that’s been gratifying about the fallout of the Belkin story is that it has people re-evaluating things they’ve seen in the past, and looking at them in a new light (and then blogging about them).

Today brings us the example Carbonite, an online backup service, which a customer named Bruce says failed to restore his data. So apparently he went to Amazon.com to post a review detailing his experience. That’s when he noticed something funny.

Several reviews caught his eye– all positive, all posted on the same day in 2006, all from people in the same area, Boston, Massachusetts (where the company happens to be located). Bruce did some more snooping and discovered that high level employees of the company were giving their product glowing reviews pretending to be ordinary people who paid to use the service and weren’t affiliated with the company. The best part? They were dumb enough to use their real names!

So Bruce did the only thing he could do: he blogged about it. And so did David Pogue. That’s when the CEO of the company started proffering apologies.

The phony reviews were removed by Amazon (but you can still see screenshots on Bruce’s blog), and Carbonite’s CEO is acting the saint and bemoaning the fact that nobody brought this to his attention sooner because he surely would have removed the reviews had he known about them. Only somebody did last year and he did nothing about it (the CEO himself commented in that same NYT blog thread here a day later saying he read the comments and “I take every customer’s issues seriously”). No word on whether or not anyone has been disciplined for these astroturfed reviews, even though it seems they were all posted at the same time (and must have been coordinated by someone).

In any case, this is a case of a company doing unethical activities to promote themselves. But it’s more obviously a case of bloggers raising their voices and looking out for consumers. So that’s pretty awesome. Power to the posters!

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog