NB: This is a guest article by Robert Cole, founder of hospitality and travel marketing strategy and technology consulting company RockCheetah. He also blogs at Views from a Corner Suite.
Almost a month on since myseriesofposts on Fake Review Optimization, there is some still scepticism out there about the concept and its impact in travel.
As I've previously described, groups and individuals participating in it go to significant lengths to avoid detection - again, it is a very similar to the black-hat SEO and website security hacking specialists.
Here are some further thoughts after reading all the comments against the four original articles.
Are the authorities cracking down on it?
Outside the hospitality industry, the US Federal Trade Commission fined Legacy Learning Systems $250,000 for hiring affiliates to positively review their DVD series on various websites.
Ann Taylor Loft had the first FTC investigation for providing bloggers with $10 gift cards to attend and comment on a fashion show, with the bloggers failing to report the gift. The FTC also forced Reverb Communications to stop planting fake reviews in the iTunes Store.
But, heck, am I over-reacting about the threat of Fake Review Optimization? I have been asked to name names, so here are a few of the brazen ones which have websites professing black-hat tactics under the auspices of Online Reputation Management.
[NB: Disclosure - Stacey Higgins of Hotelnewsnow.com found some of these firms in August when researching a story on the topic that included some of my perspectives]
- PostingOnlyGoodReviews.com, now shut down, but which stated: "The process of managing an online reputation requires both displacing the negative search result(s) and replacing it with only positive search results. Achieving this mission needs a specialized set of skills: internet promotion and marketing, public relations, search engine optimization"
- OnlineReputationGroup.com, also shut down, which offered a variety of packages including one at $7,500 per month that included "10 websites with advance on page SEO optimization, 1000 reviews, 2500 backlinks, 5 video submissions on up to 150 video sites and listing research"
If you question the veracity of these citations, I have the screen shots to support them.
Here are a few of my favorites that are still in business:
PaladinRep promotes that clients should "immunize your reputation" by "Posting hundreds of positive articles, blog, journal and forum entries, news items, press releases and other pages on a steady, on-going basis" and "posting positive experiences in other related forums."
Plussem - Not reviews per se, but targeting a similar objective. It specializes in Google +1s, making the following commitments:
- All +1's come from people with a google account that has been verified by phone (Phone Verified Accounts)
- All +1's come from real people. No bots are being used!
- All +1's are being given by manually going to your website and clicking the +1 button
- It’s untraceble because the +1's are being given from different IP’s
- All +1's are given dripped over a couple of days so it looks natural
Wow - it looks real, too bad it's not...
I really like TheReputationProfessional. It is very specific about the process - probably because it charges $49 per review. Here is a description:
"In order to ensure that reviews go up and stay up on the most respected review sites, our process cannot be "automated" and we cannot use overseas labor forces. An actual person, physically located near your business and on a residential or business network will place your review.
"Usually their accounts will be linked with facebook and other social networking sites to give the review more legitimacy. Their accounts will also have placed other, respected reviews and will be taken seriously by the website they are placed on as well as the potential customers using the website to find your business."
I also especially like the 10% discount offer on the "don't stop until I tell you" tier of service.
Next is ReputationManagers which promises to "create and find unique positive content about your company" and "we artificially create this popularity to the tens (or hundreds) of sites that we create for you"
True, the descriptions of these services do not specifically mention TripAdvisor, but they do mention Yelp in context of eradicating negative reviews on the first two pages of Google organic search listings.
The solution at least one claims is that may take 4-6 months or longer "depending on how aggressive you want us to be, we will work to promote tens or hundreds of pages to try to push the negative websites into the deep depths of Google’s index and fight to keep them down there."
Even the segment leader Reputation.com may be toeing a creepy line when it states:
"Our patented technology and patented, proprietary strategies, developed by world-class scientists, engineers and years of R&D, can make good content rank highly in your results, eventually displacing the negative content and bumping it out of your top results."
That technology, backed by a bevy of A-list VCs, was recently honored as a World Economic Forum 2011 Technology Pioneer. Is Reputation.com breaking the law? Probably not.
Would someone armed with similar technological capabilities easily be able to break the law? Probably yes.
That decision depends solely on the ethical pedigree of the group's management. For firms lacking the sound financial backing of Reputation.com, it might be more difficult to stay on the right side of the creepy line, let alone ignore it.
Perhaps some are still unsure given that I haven't provided a specific hotel example? Therefore, please meet a repuation management company solely (at least on first look) for the hospitality sector.
Now, it may be completely legit, but some suspicion might be reasonable because:
- As a .org, it does not fit the profile of a typical non-commercial entity.
- Its co-founder is a PR Consultant specializing in SEO, it is remarkably low key as there do not appear to be any profiles on LinkedIn or any websites referencing him or his previous company that represented the likes of a major US retail brand. He did apparently teach an SEO class for a law course last year.
- Two of its offices are all located in virtual office facilities in Washington, DC and nearby. A third is an apartment complex. The 100s of professionals they claim as a staff are obviously virtual and I would guess, not full time employees.
- The hotel reputation management site looks remarkably similar (and have the same domain URL structure) to review sites for attorneys, franchises, dentists, doctors and restaurants, all of which share the same addresses and telephone numbers.
- In the 1990s, a person of a similar name to the founder was then at a Baltimore company was convicted of securities fraud in the US. The prospectus for the shares in the adult entertainment company claimed he previously worked in an advisory capacity with the same major US retail brand.
- The company claims: "We Move And Force Negative Search Results And False Online Reviews About Your Hotel Off Of Page One, Page Two, Page Three, Page Four and Page Five..." and "The more content we create, the more we feed the monster and thus we bury the negative results deeper and deeper."
That last point is somewhat unambiguous and possibly into black-hat territory in my book.
Of course, if you prefer to avoid the above firms, you can always go the low cost route by using Fiverr to find people willing to write reviews.
Or, if you have a bit more initiative, you can solicit review writers on Elance.com. For example, as I write this, the current listing was posted and had received 11 proposals:
"We require someone to write reviews for our products. They will need to be 2 - 3 sentences each, in informal english. Each product will require about 5 - 8 reviews, with unique content. There are about 20 products initially and this will goto about 200 if the work is of a high enough standard."
These are only examples of organizations brazen enough to broach the subject on public websites. The covert black-hat folks are not prone to such visibility.
However, if you question the methods I describe to support a covert, black-hat online reputation management business, here's an example of a fairly specific solicitation for a relatively sophisticated astroturfing/sockpuppet platform.
No, it was not targeting the hotel industry, but the US Air Force wanted it for some serious reputation management challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were six components:
0001 - Online Persona Management Service. 50 User Licenses, 10 Personas per user
Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent.
Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.
Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user's situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.
0002- Secure Virtual Private Network (VPN). 1 each
VPN provides the ability for users to daily and automatically obtain randomly selected IP addresses through which they can access the internet.
The daily rotation of the user's IP address prevents compromise during observation of likely or targeted web sites or services, while hiding the existence of the operation. In addition, may provide traffic mixing, blending the user s traffic with traffic from multitudes of users from outside the organization.
This traffic blending provides excellent cover and powerful deniability. Anonymizer Enterprise Chameleon or equal
0003- Static IP Address Management. 50 each
Licence protects the identity of government agencies and enterprise organizations. Enables organizations to manage their persistent online personas by assigning static IP addresses to each persona.
Individuals can perform static impersonations, which allow them to look like the same person over time. Also allows organizations that frequent same site/service often to easily switch IP addresses to look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization. Anonymizer IP Mapper License or equal
0004- Virtual Private Servers, CONUS. 1 each
Provides CONUS or OCONUS points of presence locations that are setup for each customer based on the geographic area of operations the customer is operating within and which allow a customer's online persona(s) to appear to originate from.
Ability to provide virtual private servers that are procured using commercial hosting centers around the world and which are established anonymously. Once procured, the geosite is incorporated into the network and integrated within the customers environment and ready for use by the customer.
Unless specifically designated as shared, locations are dedicated for use by each customer and never shared among other customers. Anonymizer Annual Dedicated CONUS Light Geosite or equal
0005- Virtual Private Servers, OCONUS. 8 Each
Provides CONUS or OCONUS points of presence locations that are setup for each customer based on the geographic area of operations the customer is operating within and which allow a customer's online persona(s) to appear to originate from.
Ability to provide virtual private servers that are procured using commercial hosting centers around the world and which are established anonymously. Once procured, the geosite is incorporated into the network and integrated within the customers environment and ready for use by the customer.
Unless specifically designated as shared, locations are dedicated for use by each customer and never shared among other customers. Anonymizer Annual Dedicated OCONUS Light Geosite or equal
0006- Remote Access Secure Virtual Private Network. 1 each
Secure Operating Environment provides a reliable and protected computing environment from which to stage and conduct operations. Every session uses a clean Virtual Machine (VM) image.
The solution is accessed through sets of Virtual Private Network (VPN) devices located at each Customer facility. The fully-managed VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is an environment that allows users remote access from their desktop into a VM.
Upon session termination, the VM is deleted and any virus, worm, or malicious software that the user inadvertently downloaded is destroyed. Anonymizer Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Solution or equal.
Solutions?
It does not take a lot of money or a government contract to build and deploy such a platform... One can argue that based on the financial benefit resulting from higher placements on hotel-related review sites, demand for such a product exists.
I look at any potentially disruptive technology or business model with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, just because one can't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
In this case, this is not a witch hunt - it is a growing problem facing not only the hotel industry, but all lines of businesses that benefit from consumer generated reviews.
My four part series of posts appropriately lays out the stakes, the tactics being employed and the methods to combat the problem.
I also hope that TripAdvisor and the global hospitality industry take the threat seriously. As I mention in the articles, fighting Fake Review Optimization is potentially a lot more challenging than fighting web spam.
NB: This is a guest article by Robert Cole, founder of hospitality and travel marketing strategy and technology consulting company RockCheetah. He also blogs at Views from a Corner Suite.
NB2:Image via Shutterstock.