Best-selling crime writer RJ Ellory has turned out to be the latest author exposed in the ongoing saga of fake Amazon reviews, a can of worm that just keeps on wriggling.
The game, 12 years in the making, is already beginning to receive rave reviews from notable publications, even if Metacritic and Amazon user reviews took a beating after the launch trouble.
Anyone researching a big remodeling project likely ends up at Amazon for reviews, tutorials and pricing information.
FORBES: Ace's Helpful Hardware Man Could Help Amazon Kill DIY Centers
We often forget that everything you post online, from your Facebook profile to your Amazon book reviews, is out there for others to see and judge.
Example: Amazon publishes customer reviews as well as those by staffers and outside reviewers.
Amazon encourages customer reviews, and they allow readers to vote on whether or not reviews are helpful.
Amazon also provides reviews so customers can see feedback from others on the same or similar products.
While Amazon has long had user reviews on its site, Amazon.com does not have social features that Goodreads does.
FORBES: Goodreads Investor Jon Callaghan On Amazon Acquisition Of 'Scrappy' Startup
At the weekend, best-selling crimewriter R J Ellory admitted using pseudonyms to write glowing reviews on the Amazon book website while criticising his rivals with bad reviews.
Moreover, Amazon through its consumer reviews is already a stealth player in social media.
FORBES: Apple Should Dig Into The Couch Cushions And Buy Twitter
Its Encore program has begun to publish books by self-published authors whose work attracts good reviews on Amazon.com.
Mitchell, 60, is a Boston management consultant who in his spare time writes 600-word book reviews for Amazon.com.
The striking thing about the vast majority of reader reviews at Amazon.com is how seriously their contributors take them.
Yet to say that user-generated reviews on Amazon (and around the Web in general) are an untrustworthy measure of quality is a massive understatement.
Crowd-sourced reviews on Amazon.com are surely the future of the form.
FORBES: Rupert Murdoch Hates The NYT, Part XIX: WSJ To Launch Book Review Section
Another factor at play is lighter-touch consumer reviews such as Amazon, Yelp and increasingly, Foursquare.
Neville pointed to reviews on the Amazon website in which he claimed Millar used fake identities to laud his own books and put down other writers.
Online peer reviews are notoriously unreliable, and although Amazon and other sites have made significant efforts to eliminate biased or untrustworthy reviews, it is still difficult to judge the quality of a book from consumer reviews alone.
FORBES: The Trouble With Finding Books Online - And A Few Solutions
Now the proxy for quality is how your book fares in terms of reviews and ratings on Amazon, and sales.
FORBES: Considering Self-Publishing? Don't Bother, Unless You Follow Guy Kawasaki's Advice
The argument in favor of Amazon being disrupted is, roughly, that the foundation Amazon is built on, customer reviews, is now too shaky.
FORBES: Disrupting Amazon. But Isn't Amazon Already Ahead Of The Game?
One of the site's best features is a list of essential finance texts, including thumbnail reviews and links to Amazon.com (Burry's only source of revenue, since he doesn't accept banner ads).
There are some workarounds, but it would be so much easier to understand how my promotions are performing if I had more information about how people find my book on Amazon, whether they read the reviews, what actions they take before they buy, what actions they take when they leave my page without buying.
User reviews at both Metacritic and Amazon are about as bad as they can get.
FORBES: EA Suspending SimCity Marketing Over Server Struggles
However, its in the interest of other companies, such as Amazon and TripAdvisor, to ensure that reviews are accurate.
Ultimately, however, the reviewers are anonymous (they are not required to give their real names) and offending reviews are removed only if Amazon checkers notice them.
Puri created a profile page that includes photos of the restaurant, reviews and a link to Amazon, where Facebookers can buy a book written by the restaurant's chef.
Shoppers can use an iPhone Amazon price check app to read product reviews of products they focus their smart phones on in stores, but also to see if the same item can be purchased through Amazon for less money, a ploy the online retailer is using hoping to activate the economy-driven value nerve currently vibrating through much of the marketplace.
FORBES: For EBay, Amazon And All Retailers, Presence When Inspiration Hits Is Critical
Amazon especially must now re-examine their reviews system and think about how they can find and remove the fakers.
One example is the business need to find out what is being said about your products across the internet via product reviews and comments in places like Amazon or other rating locations.
应用推荐