The liars

Only if information is publicly available at other company.



Review sites, sometimes.

Consumer Advocates, almost never. These people usually have an axe to grind.

With both, I keep a smart eye to trying to determine if there is an affiliate relationship involved.



Like I said before, most "consumer advocates" have an axe to grind.

We see it around here all the time... Multitudes of people try to position themselves as the "only reliable person" who is looking out for the newbie.

Yet most of those people attempting to defend the interests of the newbie are people who have never seen success of their own, so they are in fact observing the marketplace through the eyes of a newbie, and they are incapable of giving the newbie real insight into what is good and what is without merit.



I try very hard not to be part of the problem. And, if I discover that I was wrong about something, I am often quick to correct myself in front of an audience.



Yes... More often than I would care to admit...



It sounds like you are personally dealing with this issue yourself.

Each situation demands a different approach in my perspective. I have dealt with it myself, and sometimes I turned it into a positive, and other times, I have horribly mangled the situation.

I totally agree with this comment.

As vendors, we do have a choice as to who we will work.

Anyone who fails to recognize that they have a choice in regards to the clients they accept is making decisions based on desperate need rather than absolute confidence in the value that they give their customers.

Yep. I am constantly having to reeducate people. One of my pet peeves are unqualified or fake review sites and unqualified deceptive or uninformed consumer advocates who mislead and misinform.

Recently I read not only false but outrageously strange imaginative and libelous statements about myself and my company on a fake review site run by a deceptive fake consumer advocate.

Like many who have responded I view all reviews, comparison charts etc with a grain of salt. I also hope that most others do. However having been the target of many fake reviews, deceptive advertising, and inaccurate comparison charts these activities DO take their tolls. Usually there are affiliates and competitors or their confederates behind these activities but occasionally there is some truly misguided fake expert who has positioned themselves as a savior to the masses who has some "ax to grind" and who casts a wide net of misinformation.

I generally ignore these things but recently spotted information on one review site that went beyond the usual fake review filled with inaccuracies into the world of make believe.

The owner of this site, a fake consumer advocate who publishes under a pseudonym, and who's site is dedicated to the purpose of tearing down the competition and promoting a service that competes with mine, took to publishing some wildly imaginative, and very detailed completely false things about myself and even the administration of the warrior forum.

The things they posted were pure make believe. But they posted them as fact. They were so far from reality it sounded as if they could have been posting about some other person by the same name.

No, I have not seen theirs. I agree with you though comparisons are biased. This is why I don't publish comparison charts and when asked questions like how do my products and services compare to others I respond by first saying "they don't because we are so different in the features we provide." instead I tell people to check out features and trials and compare for themselves.

Unfortunately I have discovered that deceptive ppc ads with strait up lies, fake review sites, and fake consumer advocacy is a common practice among affiliates and service providers in ecommerce and Internet marketing.

However it does not stop there. There are review portals popping up who are NOT promoting or affiliates of specific offers associated with the reviews they publish. These review portals are attempting to establish themselves by posting precursory, fake or unqualified reviews and backing them up with additional sub reviews in the form of paid or fake commenters who then post as if they are rating the service as an actual user which is validating the review. However, these commenters are not users at all but merely post additional reviews or comments and ratings based on precursory research and target keywords for seo purposes. Additional comments get added by real people after the site gets indexed in google when the public begins finding them. The purpose of fake review portals like this is to build real estate via SEO and then capitalize on the traffic by monetizing the site with ads, affiliate offers, and possibly list building for email marketing. This is not much different than splogging except that the goal, after the initial fake reviews, is to generate enough traffic and trust that they begin to collect real reviews.

How do I know all this? Well it's not hard to spot and I get google notifications of certain keywords that point so some rather interesting results. Not only do I have to deal with the libelous fake review sites and false consumer advocates but also the opposite... Fake positive reviews which are easy to spot when they review features of services that the service does not have or publish comparison charts claiming that either a service has or does not have features it does not or does have.

Many sites will even use spun articles and will post positive fake reviews about services they do not promote just to attempt to get in the search results.

I would encourage people to speak out when they see this happening. Even when I see a fake positive review of my own products and services I will report them to google and do what I can to discourage the publisher. Unfortunately commenting rebuttals on these sites that allow comments only adds search engine fodder to them and linking to them to expose them just builds interest in the SERPS.

I am hoping conversations like these will help those who are tempted to add their own reviews or comments to these sites a second thought. Unfortunately there are even a few members of this forum that run these types of sites and participate in these forms of deceptive Internet marketing as affiliates.

If you are ever tempted to regurgitate a review you read or pass along a link to a review site for a product you have no experience with or even repeat a common negative expression about a company you have no experience with... Please think twice and first do your own due diligence and check out the product, service, or company for your self or DON'T comment or regurgitate gossip.

The marketplace IS full of smart people who DO see through this and they do talk. So if you are a consumer advocate who has ever published a fake review of services you have not used or if you facilitate this type of behavior or if you have published information about individuals that is false, imagined, fabricated or based on second hand gossip...

YOUR lies don't go unnoticed.

I hope people realize what a brilliant statement this is. It is so true.

The other day I saw a really long detailed reply in a Facebook group. The person who posted it had honest intentions... But they had deceaved themselves. They posted from their preconceptions based on a lack of education, a lack of experience, a lack of qualifications... Yet they skillfully used double talk and what experience they did have to express themselves in such a way as to position themselves as an expert in the discussion. They attracted the attention of others seeking answers on the subject being discussed because they appeared to be an expert.

However, I had extensive experience with this person and had a detailed knowledge of both their work and the problems that their lack of understanding and expertise in the area they were offering advice could cause.

I had a qualified expert, who was also aquainted with their previous work review their statement to confirm or deny my concerns. Not only did they successfully position themselves as an expert with what they stated in the eyes of those who did not have training in the subject... But under scrutiny their own statements showed they continued to use flawed logic, incorrect methodologies etc to do their work.

Much like building houses the structures they create look fine at first and even appear to operate as intended at first. Unfortunately when placed under significant stress the flaws show and the structure begins to fail.

This is one of the things that holds so many people back when developing businesses online. They think that just because someone built a shoddy house... Or pretends to have built one that they should follow their advice.

Worse yet those who were originally excited about moving into their new house discover years later that all the houses built in that development have glass ceilings which prohibit the growth of their business due to limitations that the experts they followed did not bother to understand before they began distributing the plans.