Where are all these reviews coming from?
Recently, several of our customers have forwarded me an email from a new company offering to get you:
- 30 Glowing Customer Reviews
(Thirty boastful reviews on your choice of the nation’s top travel review sites)
- 1,000 Facebook Friends
(One thousand authentic Facebook users nationwide influences new guests to reserve accommodations at your property)
All for the "low" price of $500! I am imagining Dr. Evil drawing his pinky finger up to the corner of his mouth as he slyly lisps, "FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS".
This is just chicanery, plain and simple. Fake Reviews are not only bad for the industry, they are illegal, and the FTC is enforcing its endorsement guidelines. Google also will delete fake reviews, and the business using them will be dinged in the search results.
As for purchased Facebook fans, how does adding a thousand new "fans" who don't care about your business and are not going to interact with you or recommend your business at all helpful? They will not visit your page in the future, and that will drop your Facebook Edgerank, which is the algorithm Facebook uses to determine how much of your content should be shared with users.
This company's email says: "Give your Inn the gift of our exclusive “Inn-Bound Marketing Package” this season."
That is a "gift" that is better left unopened!
Happy Holidays!
Annie Buck
Sales
Acorn IS
The phone # and whois tracks back to someone named Gilbert Goldstein in LA, and the absolute irony, 1 count em, 1 fan on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Bragginfly Between the cheesy picture and the writeup on their site and FB and absolutely no social media presence any where else for either Gilbert or Bragginfly, it almost comes across as an April Fool’s joke.
And there maybe no connection but https://www.facebook.com/gilbert.goldstein.7 appears to be a spoofed/fake facebook account, if you look at all his “friends” they are a tad odd to say the least and they all appear to be “friends” with each other.
Sorry and one more. Why do the names on the service levels http://www.bragginfly.com/services.html match up to the characters from the Big Bang theory. Weirder and weirder.