Cloud CRM Software Forum

The CRM implications of fake recommendations

If you're paying attention you've seen that on-line recommendations carry a lot of weight with consumers. A study by Nielsen released last July showed that consumer opinions posted on line were valued second only to friend's recommendations in the degree of trust consumers placed in them. A full 70 percent of those interviewed said they trust "completely" or "somewhat" these on-line recommendations.

That makes them a powerful tool. And like any powerful tool, that leads marketers to figure out ways to game the system. For example, the other night I was having dinner with a friend of mine, and he pulled out a neat electronic gadget that I knew was outside his budget. I asked him how he had escaped the wrath of his wife around this. His answer was: easily.

"I bought it from some friends' company," he said. "The reimbursed me for it."

All that was needed for the reimbursement was a positive recommendation posted on-line somewhere.

"Without recommendations, you sink to the bottom of the Google listings," he explained. His friends were essentially trading him gear for recommendations – and, he said, "everybody's doing it," at least in the market space his friends work in.

That raises a couple of troubling issues – but issues we've should have seen coming for a long time. First, there's very little out there to keep marketers from cranking out recommendations about their own products, or bringing in ringers like my friend. That puts in question the value of user recommendations; when the ratio of authentic to inauthentic tips the wrong way, the whole point of user recommendations will become moot. They'll just be another means of advertising.

Second, they raise a real PR problem when it becomes public knowledge that your company is misrepresenting itself behind an assortment of aliases or proxies. Uncool, and very much against the concept of authenticity as outlined by Joe Pine.

Third, from a CRM perspective, it threatens to jam your own ability to read sentiment about your company and your competitors. At what point do the words of your recommendation ringers start to be believed by your own company as evidence of a job well done and mask real issues you need to deal with? Do you publicize internally any extraordinary efforts to create recommendations in order to avoid that?

Fourth, what kind of corporate culture do you create when you resort to these tactics? It runs completely counter to the social CRM more of openness and trust. Sure, a higher Google placement's nice, but there are other, less ethically-icky ways of nudging your name higher up the page.

This is all part of a new frontier for marketing and for CRM. But ethical behavior is still ethical behavior – and social media allows the abusers to be called out much more quickly and loudly. So, unless you're furnishing by friend with gadgets (I would hate to ruin his good thing), avoid or abandon these practices. They may seem useful now, but they can blow up in your face – and consumers will hear all about it.