Marketing Ninja

Consumer activist sites like The Consumerist and online review aggregators like Yelp and Amazon have helped put more power into the hands of the consumers; corporations who run unethical marketing campaigns or ones that treat their customers poorly are rightly ousted by sites like these.

Ultimately bad reviews and stories from these sites force companies to stay honest by hitting them in the pocket book, and that’s one of the beautiful things about the Internet: the complaints of a few “average Joes” can be leveraged successfully against powerful companies.

But what happens when an army of misinformed consumers use these sites as echo chambers for false claims about small businesses? What happens when a small business is caught in a self-feeding storm of inaccurate, yet damaging buzz with no opportunities to defend itself?

This hit close to home for me recently – we had a negative review pop up on Amazon, one that also happened to be grossly inaccurate and speculative. The details of the review wouldn’t make such sense here unless you’re familiar with our product, but the spirit of the article was something along the lines of someone who didn’t understand why this product didn’t work like an entirely different product aimed at a different market.

Imagine if someone bought a rider lawn mower and complained about how it was a pain in the ass to push – that’s the level of inaccuracy that went into the review about our product.

Of course, being that most of the people who came to check out our product on Amazon have never actually used the product they have no inhibitions about voting up the review, and that has quickly made the review the most popular. I also suspect that there’s some psychology at work here – I think a lot of people want to be talked out of spending money on a product, even if it’s good, and are relieved as soon as they see a negative review which gives them a legitimate excuse for not purchasing.

We’re not the only ones who’ve had this problem – Dino Esposito, a prominent .NET author, has had issues with trolls writing zero-substance digs at his books since 2004.

I wonder how many sales have been lost to totally inaccurate reviews; probably a lot. Amazon began using the Real Names engine a while back in order to eliminate trolling, and that’s a good start, but it still doesn’t do anything to enable companies to fight back against inaccurate reviews written by real people.

Why should a company lose tons of potential sales because a customer couldn’t figure out that you’re supposed to sit on top of a rider lawn mower and drive it per my absurd example? Giving customers a voice is a great but when that voice starts shrieking inaccurate information, aren’t companies entitled to clear their names?

I say “yes.”

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!