Belkin responded to the Mechanical Turk Shilling Incident (as it’s now called around the office.) Their response? “We’re sorry, we didn’t know it was going on, and we’re doing something about it.” Read the full note from Belkin’s President Mark Reynoso below.
Belkin has always held itself to the highest standards of corporate ethics and its employees to the highest standards of personal integrity. Similarly, we support our online user community in discussion and reviews of our products, whether the commentary is good or bad. So, it was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment.
Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction. We regard our responsibility to our user community as sacred, and we are extremely sorry that this happened.
We want to stress that this is an isolated incident and to re-instill trust with you, we have taken the following courses of action:
- We’ve acted swiftly to remove all associated postings from the Mechanical Turk system.
- We’re working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed.
It’s also important to recognize that our retail partners had no knowledge of, or participation in, these postings.
Once again, we apologize for this occurrence, and we will work earnestly to regain the trust we have lost.
Sincerely,
Mark Reynoso
President, Belkin
CE manufacturers – please don’t shill. It’s not worth it. If your products are good, they will sell. The small jump you’ll gain in sales isn’t worth the wrath of dedicated consumers. Thanks for the note, Mark.
Keep it up. Mechanical turk, subvert and profit, craigslist perhaps, odesk.com and other outlets should be constantly scanned by the blogs to bring this sh*t up.
At least they where honest.
Honest? That’s a load. Looks like standard corporate CYA and whitewashing. If they managed to get the items taken of Mechanical Turk, then they should know the username and thus the employee who did this. No mention of firing or taking action against the individual that did this. I find that striking. This type of behavior isn’t even close to any kind of grey area and the employee needs to be canned.
Alan
Yes, they know the employee who did this. His LinkedIn was mentioned on TechCrunch.
How can one employee do this? It requires access to a bank account – it should require a requisition form or approval of some sort. This sounds just as bogus as the reviews.
Easy… A corporate credit card.
On the expense reports, it would probably just show up as “Amazon” and could be listed as some type of marketing.
Plus, the cost probably wasn’t enough to raise any eyebrows in the accounting department.
It’s probably not HR-friendly to mention firing an employee before a case can be built against them. It can be argued that it shows intent to fire the guilty party once located, but the defense during a HR negotiation could simply say that the company always intended to fire that one employee regardless of the investigation.
It’s more HR-type CYA than corporate doubletalk.
They don’t need a trial conviction to fire someone. It was a clear case with a specific person clearly doing a very wrong thing.
If they were serious, they’d quickly investigate to make sure it’s not a news spin kind of thing, and if it’s not, as we know from their response, fire the guy. If they hold themselves to the highest standards, that’s their only option. Otherwise, what kind of message do they send to their employees or even to the wrist-slapped wrong-doer who is still working for them!
I wouldn’t trust a company who says to their employees: “Try not to get caught next time.”
All reviews on websites that are 5/5 i always skip, doesn’t show the true value of the product. I always go straight to the 1 star reviews, see why they are there, and if they are true. An angry customer is someone whom will express their ideas about a product better then one whom was blinded by the praise of plug n play.
I’ve used linksys forever and love them. Sorry Belkie.. maybe never time!
Justine You are HOT !
Justine paid you 65 cents to say that didn’t she?
Yeah.. Justine.. you are way smokin’ hot.
Are you guys blind? She is the equivalent of a pole dancer in a dark room. No substance and only good for hard-up guys.
While I’m not sold on the authenticity of their communication, it was very nice of them to reach out and e-mail you.
They should take a note from Gary Vaynerchuk’s book on communication. Instead of sending a generic sounding e-mail with no personality, maybe the president should have left a Seesmic comment. That would have scored them huge points with people who buy belkin products.
Which book are you referring to?
A Seesmic reply would have been neat, but how many Belkin customers are also TechCrunch loyalists? Would make for an interesting Venn diagram, but I don’t think it would have made much of a difference.
Gary V’s scenario was different, he was defending his brand, his website.
Why wasn’t it authentic? Because they used correct grammar, like did ya mean honest? Heartfelt?
I like that they accepted the mistake as well, it’s nice to fast a prompt response apologizing.
that was timely, necessary and probably not sufficient. belkin will need to reinforce the message. maybe follow on pr/marketing/message broadcasted out there.
Interesting however that there was no mention whatosever of any discipline meted out to the person responsible for this mess.
Absolutely. Also, they have this kind of “who could have predicted?!” attitude. Expect that to roll out again once people figure out how to spam Twitter.
Why should that person be disciplined?
Let’s say this has an impact on Belkin of $100,000, and this person’s salary is $50,000. This year or last year, however you look at it, the company has given him a salary, and spent twice that on his training. If he improves, it’s a good lesson, and one that you can’t undo. If he genuinely cares about Belkin as a business and not just a paycheck, then I think he might be worth giving a second chance. I’m not someone to fire a person over a mistake as long as they put in effort to do better.
You may be unaware that it’s historically customary to at least mention something about the employee, pithy or not.
“If he improves, it’s a good lesson…”
Anybody with a sense of ethics (and common sense) wouldn’t have done this in the first place. You can’t instill a sense of ethics in somebody in a day. I wouldn’t fire somebody over a technical mistake, but this is a mistake of ethics.
“Why should that person be disciplined?” uh, because of unethical business practices, black-hat marketing and that they’re probably generally not worthy of trust? $100,000 on training? LOL!
… but so does TechCrunch. Just like every other news comapny, you guys get your business by covering the “shame on you” topics. Why? Because bad news sells and you are no different.
This isn’t a minor slip-up, this is a serious moral lapse and implies that the offender is not only unqualified for the job, but a threat to the company as well. If Belkin has any respect for itself as a company, as they seem to have, then they should get rid of the employee.
there’s a good chance they will get rid of the employee. for a variety of reasons, it’s probably not appropriate for them to post that here or in a letter to someone outside of the company.
by the way, I’m not sure they will be doing much other “proactive pr” — very small community has seen this, so would really need to think through the pros/cons.
and overall, i think their products hold up fine in “professional reviews” … don’t know that it’s even possible to purchase a “bad” router, switch, or firewall these days — pretty well commodity products. just a question of personal preference, needs, and interface
was mildly interesting on day 1, nice to know the ceo was in touch, but i think all of the news/interest value is now shot.
Unless they tar/feather the guy, and send in high quality pics, enough already!
Sounds a little spoooky..
test {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/juTeBuActT_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”test ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/Hd7Q3hJEN7″}}}
Your test appears to have failed.
Nah, he was testing to see if he could waste 15 seconds of your time.
I bet they went Phew, only a couple of blogs picked it up and not something major like TV or newspaper. Taught them to cover their trail a little better and back to the payperpost and odesk with a little more cover in place.
ha!! oops, I’m glad that wasn’t my mistake. This reminds me of the old adage ‘Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want made public’ Seriously, whenever you make business decisions you’ve got to think to yourself ‘what’s the worst thing that could happen if this gets out?’ If it’s going to make you look really really bad (let’s face it, this makes Belkin look really really bad) you should think twice.
While the statement: “Belkin does not participate in…unethical practices like this” does not reconcile with the facts, Belkin deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Having said that, the BD rep who willfully engaged people to create fictitious endorsements (and dis competitors) in an attempt to mislead consumers needs to go. The fact that his status isn’t addressed suggests they may be concerned about what he might say.
This from the company whose routers used to modify Google searches to embed referral codes, earning them money on every search ad click.
Don’t you believe they didn’t do this on purpose.
Really? Sweet.
Had a Linksys and a Belkin router which would constantly disconnect. Perhaps, once an hour. Finally settled on a Netgear router which has been working flawlessly for over a year. If this should die eventually, I’m sure as hell not going with Belkin. You can’t trust it.
The only nearly acceptable response from Belkin would be to publicly fire the employee.
I’m waiting….
1) Two words: Plausible Deniability. The employee is probably a willing scapegoat. Better the public perception of a rogue employee than an entire unethical company.
2) Never trust anyone who tells you they’re honest.
Mark Reynoso’s note comes across as very genuine. I would expect they’ll put safeguards in place to ensure this never happens again.
Ok, how many of you guys are being paid to give positive remarks about Reynoso’s response to the scandal?
As some of the other commenter mentioned, this activity must have been supported by company otherwise, they would have mentioned something about the action they have taken about the employee.
This should also be a lesson for Amazon. They should restrict to the review to only customers who have bought the item. This way, these sorts of things can be eliminated.
That doesn’t eliminate the problem, it just raises the price ;-)
Not good enough in my books. As noted above, they must know who was responsible for this, and that person should be given the boot.
If the person is not fired, then the following is nothing more than empty words: “Belkin has always held itself to the highest standards of corporate ethics and its employees to the highest standards of personal integrity”.
Employee: Okay, Boss, I set up all those positive reviews you wanted.
Boss: The media found out, now we have to pretend to apologize. You’re fired.
Employee: You’re firing me for following orders? Sweet! See ya in court. (Pulls out phone.) Hello, media? I’ve got an even better story!
Exactly! So the fact that they are not firing him shows that they are not being honest (in one way or another).
Waterboarding
Is there any evidence that the Requester was really Mike Bayard?
Priceless PR for Amazon.
All of those who never had heard of The Mechanical Turk, know by now.
If only someone would misuse our service and have similar PR exposure – that would be priceless.
The problem is that Belkin and Amazon aren’t the only companies involved in such practices (New Egg?). They were just caught this time – by a few people.
I think paying for reviews should come under advertising laws and be clearly marked. A short letter to 50 states Attorney General’s might clear this sort of deception up.
This has been a growing problem for some time.
The level of ethics in the book publishing industry on amazon is much worse than with routers. In books it’s very common that companies hire people to not only write good reviews about their own products but to sabotage competitors’ products on amazon. I agree that the law needs to get involved. But what happens when the government themselves are the alleged saboteurs such as the case with Lonely Planet (owned by BBC)? We have evidence that high level execs at Lonely Planet sponsor sabotage of competitors. For example, see this review: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/AAYN39K47RBFM/ref=cm_cr_dp_auth_rev?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview (this review appeared only days after I received a call from a Lonely Planet president inquiring about exactly what evidence we have and against whom.) The reality is that for a smart black hat hit man that knows how to cover his tracks (unlike the Belkin guy) it’s very hard to prove cases like this beyond a reasonable doubt. The law and law enforcement need to get involved, as this is a growing tactic used by a new breed of corporate criminals.
No. I am not accepting it. Having done my share of at home tech support, Belkin’s products have always been crap. There probably AREN’T any genuine positive reviews of their products out there.
They should have gone out of business ages ago.
I love Belkin, they offer some of the best stuff around and thier customer support is second to none!
RT
http://www.anonweb.pro.tc
Right! Not only should the overly-ambitious BizDev guy be quietly fired by Belkin, but he should be publicly denounced by his former employer and PERMANENTLY BANNED from ever working again.
In fact he should be forced to spend the rest of his life homeless on the street. Hopefully he’ll die during the next big snowstorm.
Only then will the vicious Internet Haters be satisfied.
/sarcasm
NYCtek: And burned in boiling oil, with a live video feed on Hulu. Don’t forget that.
Yes Belkin, i’m sure, dealt *privately* in some manner with the employee, the way it should be.
They knew, or that guy would not have wasted his time posting or arranging fake reviews.
If belkin is telling the truth, then this guy is just sooo giddy about the product that he has to make sure that everyone else knows how great it is.
BTW Who CARES
Belkin has always sucked.
If any of you are true IT people, then you have probably learned about Belkin the hard way. Ever heard the saying “You get what you pay for”? Well if you want good IT equipment, you stick to brands like Cisco, HP, APC, Black Box, Linksys, Fluke and even Nortel who have been around a very long time because they have reliable, tried-and-true products. But if you don’t recognize the importance of using dependable networking equipment, and you don’t mind that your equipment was made in a 3rd world town by people earning slave-labor wages, then take the Wal-Mart path and buy some Belkin stuff. Let’s face it; if they had great products, would they really need to pay people to write nice reviews? Duh.
Purdy (the paintbrush company) had their marketing company employee do this too. When busted, they promised to stop, but started right back up again after a few months.
http://www.ownrecognizance.com/purdy.html
GREAT RESPONSE BY BELKIN PRESIDENT.
I agree with some of the responders above. It will need to mention that response everytime the turk incident is brought up.
More important, I would like to see a follow up post Belkin in response to the employee. Do they give him a second change or does he get canned.
I would like to see some general stats. How many total posts were removed to make sure they followed through.
why would you want the employee to be fired? he was just doing what some other jackass told him to do. the president of belkin should be fired.
Not surprised at all by this. Just weird that it would be all that traceable. Unethical? Yes. Are they the only ones doing it? Nope.
There is a certain security company employing a “digital marketing firm” to make it appear as they have a great reach into their support forums–both internally and with the overall community. Looks great, until people figure out who it is that is “brand building.”
I love Belkin, they offer some of the best stuff around and thier customer support is second to none!!
why would you want the employee to be fired? he was just doing what some other jackass told him to do. the president of belkin should be fired..
I have used linksys for a while now and I find them better then belkin.
great story, thanks for all the helpful info !