EDIT: In the interest of archival, I’ll leave the body of the blog post here untouched, but I wanted to highlight at the beginning the fact that there are several comments below from folks at Netfirms attempting to clarify the subject. Dan Feferman says he was quoted out of context in the WSJ article, and clarifies that what Netfirms paid for was a straight-ahead mention on the blogs, not a positive review – an important distinction, I agree. Read the comments below for more.
A mention of web hosting firm Netfirms in a Wall Street Journal story that appeared today raises some interesting questions about the ethics of online marketing, I think.
The article in question is a sort of how-to on managing your reputation online for businesses, but Netfirms comes up when the author discusses the “controversial” practice of paying for good reviews, or creating them yourself.
“Netfirms Inc., a Web-hosting company in Markham, Ontario, is paying $10,000 to SocialSpark.com, a marketplace for paid reviewers, and to about 60 bloggers to write 200-word reviews of its new Twitter service. ‘The more positive feedback that we can have, the better,’ says Dan Feferman, its product specialist and community manager.”
I guess my first reaction to reading that was surprise about the fact that Feferman was willing to talk about it, given the possibility of tipping off prospective customers to the fact that there might be some less-than-100-percent-genuine positive reviews of the company’s services out there.
After some consideration, I think it says something positive about the company’s motives that it’s willing to talk about it. A desire to keep something like that secret seems like it would be more of an indication that the company felt it was doing something wrong, which Netfirms apparently does not.
I’m not sure if I do. The question is definitely made more interesting by the fact Netfirms is hardly a company that’s up to no good. Anyone deceived by a fake review would, at worst, be deceived into using a hosting service of better-than-average quality and reliability (incidentally, my not-paid-for opinion of Netfirms’ domain registration via Twitter service: very cool).
And yet, I can’t say the real journalist in me likes the idea of up-for-sale editorial content out there, or the ongoing blurring of the line between advertising and content online.
Sure, most of us who have been using the Internet for more than a few minutes realize that it’s not necessarily wise to believe everything you read, particularly online. But the issue resonates with me because I spend a lot of time tending to, and respecting that line.
In fact, one of the main reasons we shy away from doing anything like evaluating web hosting companies (or covering most “awards” received by hosting companies) is because it is generally assumed that most, if not all, of the web hosting reviews and awards out there are paid for.
Anyway, I’d love to hear some feedback about the practice of paying for positive reviews. Do you think it’s great? Objectionable? Par for the course?
Does anyone have any insight into using a similar service? Would you worry about disclosing it?
The WSJ piece ends with this bit of wisdom:
“While some business owners liken sponsored posts to traditional ads, keep in mind you could turn off potential customers. To prevent that, make sure the blog post contains a disclosure that it’s a paid or sponsored review.”
