Bad ideas in social media: fake application reviews

It’s pretty hard to screw up in social media if you’re being honest. As long as you’re upfront about what you’re trying to accomplish, ask permission to engage with people, and generally act like you would act in person, you’re going to be OK.

Which is why I’m always surprised at the number of people who decide that bad ideas are good ideas.

All Facebook wrote about fake application reviews yesterday, and how they’re effectively screwing up the system:

Duncan Riley wrote a post earlier today about Slide posting fake positive reviews on their own application. This has become a standard practice nowadays by companies. This problem happens time and time again when you set up any sort of review system. Even on this blog, I have application reviews. It’s pretty obvious who’s voting when immediately after I post an application review and there are suddenly 5 perfect reviews within minutes.

Here’s the thing about fake reviews: they’re deceitful.

We (noisy, blogging) consumers don’t want to be deceived.* And it makes us angry when we see companies trying to pull a fast one on us.

Every time this happens, a little bit of trust in the medium goes away. Right now, social media has this great, wonderful, high level of trust and personal contact because as a whole people are being very genuine. Let’s not waste it.

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* Outside of, say, a magic show.

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