Today’s comic over at Penny Arcade is both amusing and topical. Buzz marketing and fake viral advertising is the most worrisome and morally corrupt way to get at consumers, ever. As always, Tycho’s comments are also incredibly worthwhile.
Opinions on the internet are huge. They’re powerful. When I want to buy something on Amazon, the choice is made or broken by how people have rated it and how they’ve reviewed it. I bought a new digital camera recently, and a large part of the decision process was other (assumed) camera owners describing their experience with the camera. I was aware the entire time that people get paid to do this (I have been ever since I read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition), and I would be lying if I said that it didn’t make me uneasy, but the fact remains that user reviews are the most current, unbiased, and broad-spectrum way to learn how worthwhile an item is in the hands of your average user.
Thankfully, the FTC is moving on the issue, or at least taking some tentative first steps. Force needs to be brought to bear on both advertising and product companies to let them know that marketing via anonymous, paid comments will not be allowed. The internet is a large conversation, taking place simultaneously among thousands of people across the world. Between folksonomically-tagged content, sites ranked in relevance to the number of people talking about them, and user-ranked consumerism, the voice of the individual stands out more, day after day, in this global conversation. It’s important then, in terms of this conversation, to know exactly who is speaking, and what agenda they’re harboring.