Should Paid Reviews Always Be Positive?
Posted by Wade | Posted in Internet Marketing And SEO | Posted on 07-03-2010
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Although yesterday I wrote a small review for SERP Intel, that isn’t what this post is about. A couple of day’s ago I saw this review on Tyler Cruz’s blog :
http://www.tylercruz.com/an-in-depth-review-and-case-study-of-infolinks/
If you read the whole way through. You’ll realize that Tyler puts a pretty bad spin on InfoLinks, and even the whole inline text link industry. Now all of the things he pointed out that were negatives, were legit problems. I definitely agree with him that inline text ads constantly give irrelevant results, and they look like absolute crud.So I mean, I’m not complaining about the fact that he wrote a negative review.
What I have a slight problem with, is that he took money for this review from Infolinks, and then wrote it in a negative light. If you check his advertise page, it does clearly state that he cannot guarantee a positive review.
But still, someone paid for you to write about their company, and if you slag them. Its sure as hell not money well spent for them. Infact I would think that you would get less and less reviews if your harsh all the time. Although on the flip side, it makes Tyler look a little more legit that he isn’t kissing ass to companies all the time. And so you can trust that a review written by him, is written on what he actually thinks of the service/product.
Now I’m not saying write rubbish reviews that don’t express your points. But just don’t accept the review, and don’t accept the money for it.
I’m not sure how many of you are with Pay Per Post/Social Spark type blogging platforms. Where they pay you per post (They actually pay fairly crap btw). But if you get offered a post, and you don’t like the product, or you don’t want to endorse it, then you just reject the offer and move on. You don’t take the money and run. Most people are with some sort of Pay Per Tweet services, like Ad.ly or Sponsored Tweets. And it’s the same with these. If you don’t like whatever product your supposed to be endorsing, then just reject it. Don’t take the money and then slag the company off.
I’ve only used Sponsored Tweets, but there I know they really protect the advertisers. You receive an offer, you accept, propose a tweet, then they approve or deny that tweet. You can’t just grab a couple bucks and run with it. Seems like a pretty decent system overall.
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I absolutely agree with you Wade. If the company is an obvious scam, then I could see dogging them. But if they are a company that is really trying to do business, then I think it is unfair to take their money and then dog them. despite the low lifes in the world, most people are really trying to do the best they can.
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