Cheating the App Store: PR firm has interns post positive reviews for clients | Hacker News Reader

Cheating the App Store: PR firm has interns post positive reviews for clients

mobilecrunch.com

54 pointsvaksel23 comments

I'm assuming this is something we've all considered around here and my advice is to be very careful. This has been common (if not standard procedure as claimed below) for PR firms for a few years now, but it won't be common for much longer.

In July, Lifestyle Lift (cosmetic surgery outfit) got slapped with a $300,000 fine by the state of New York for having employees leave false-positive reviews online. The FTC has labeled this "astroturfing" and has made public announcements that they are very interested in the ease with which this practice is accomplished on large scales with new media and how that relates to their role regarding consumer protection.

I'm the online marketing guy at an integrated marketing firm in Kansas City, and last week I warned a client off of false reviews in favor of more legitimate marketing efforts (compelling link-bait, usability investments, article marketing, PPC, etc...) just last week. I cited this case during that conversation.

It's exciting to be in marketing, and the media industry in general, right now because all the rules are being re-written. It also means that you'd better stay up to date on the environment you're operating in. I'm not qualified to offer legal advice, but it seems to me that having an employee leave disingenuous reviews online isn't a far jump from having a PR firm under contract do it for you.

Almost everyone is doing this on the appstore including the big names. Moreover, I am just astonished by the fact that apple is still letting developers game the system by allowing the developers to change the availability date with new updates so that the apps show up as new releases. If they stop this, it will probably reduce the number of submissions from 8500/week to probably 1000/week and thereby being more consistent.

There's nothing wrong with highlighting well-updated apps, the problem is more that it's really uneven. Developers have to manually update the review date within 12 hours of an update going live, which is an extra step that not everyone knows about it- if Apple just automated it, no worries.

Currently the system is being gamed by developers posting updates without any real updates to take advantage of this. It annoys the hell out of me when I get updates every week for apps which dont have anything new adding on to them because developers are trying to make as much money as possible without thinking about the users at all. The review date should only be allowed to change twice an year or something so that only major updates get the advantage of being highlighted.

Yup, that's the better answer- we need a flag for 'Major Update' and a flag for 'Rush Submission' in the case of an update that has to go out quickly. If we had two rush's a year (per account) and one major per six months then that would go a long, long ways to fixing the system.

Dishonesty, from a PF firm‽

PF?

What does PF mean?

OK. I thought I missed a hidden pun.

Semi-related.. I saw a paid app recently that had hundreds of reviews, yet it wasn't particularly popular. The trick? The game gave you a code that you needed to share with other players in order to progress, and the review section seemed like the logical place to do that.. so the users often reviewed the site while sharing their code to be typed in by other players :)

That's the way to do it.

which app?

Sadly I can't remember. I was browsing somewhere in the Games section and saw an app with a suspiciously high number of reviews then saw what was going on.

It sounds a lot like one of the Mafia games. I know Mafia Live awarded points for sharing codes... think iMob did same.

Nothing new here. It's SOP for about all PR firms. Social media was the best thing that could happen to PR firms: they can broadcast their message(or framing) without interference by the press.

But with all the layoffs in the old press, journalists are overworked so it's not unusual to have PR releases slightly reworded parading as real articles in major newspapers and even more so in local ones.

"It's SOP for about all PR firms."

Not really. Generally a company hires a PR firm on retainer to make introductions between the entrepreneur and people the entrepreneur would benefit from knowing... Journalists, bloggers, business partners, etc. The PR firms then sell you an off-the-shelf media relations plan that includes services like writing and distributing press releases, doing media buys at discounted prices, booking trade show booths, etc. They also can help you develop and execute something bespoke if you're willing to pay for it.

No big PR firm would ever astroturf because their brand is worth more than the services they provide. And no real firm of any size would ever put it in their media relations plan for obvious reasons.

You can clearly hire black hat people to do this for you, but it's not like it's a legitimate PR service.

"In all PR firms" was a little too much inclusive... :-)

My comment was based on my experience when I was working for PR firms. Old school partners struggled to understand social media and asked to interns and employees to astroturf. Theses experiences made me more cynical of PR firms.

It doesn't help that many businesses in Montréal got caught doing exactly that. For example, BIXI (self-serve bicycle renting service) created a supposedly fan made blog and the two authors (which were supposed to be real fans) didn't even exist. The press had a field day with this.

Even if it's "standard operating practice", it's unethical and stupid and deserves to be ridiculed loudly and publicly.

This comment provides common sense PR firm position:

I have had clients ask me to write reviews for them, and have refused (and explained the rationale). Why? Because refusing protects them from articles like this. Something that hasn’t been a focus here is that numerous companies have engaged an agency to perform this task for them. As a PR professional, I consider exposing a client to the risk of being featured in an article like this to be completely unprofessional. I haven’t had a single person push back after explaining this.

http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/08/22/cheating-the-app-stor...

I don't think this matters all that much. There appears to be very little correlation between reviews/ratings and sales. This is especially true at lower price points, which is pretty much everything. Apps might be different, since I'm basing this on conversations with game developer friends (Touch KO, Wurdle, others).

I think negative reviews have a far stronger effect than positive, anyway. If I'm checking out an app that looks good but I see a bunch of negative reviews about crashing, etc, there's no way I'll buy it.

Cheating? Looks like the Free Market at work to me. Ain't it grand, we should convert all aspects of our society from government, law, economy, health, environment over to the Free Market. It is that awesome! People with the most money and power should be able to use it to control the rest of us, right?

so you're saying that people can be controlled because they lack the foresight to understand that some reviews could be fake in any given iphone application? i think that's called ignorance.

He is just saying that the Free Market isn't always good in and of itself, some kind of regulation is always needed, though in an inflammatory tone !

Anyways, what is the proportion of doctored/fake reviews with respect to all the 5-star reviews of these apps, did anyone get that info ?

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