With all the places online accepting user reviews (including Avvo), some service providers or product manufacturers might be tempted to cheat a bit and post their own reviews, posing as satisfied/happy/thrilled customers. This practice (known as “astroturfing”) is quite obviously unethical and constitutes false advertising. However, it persists to some degree despite the fact that responsible review sites employ some combination of robust tools, human review and community interaction to minimize astroturfing.

So what’s an astroturfer to do if the review sites are taking down its bogus reviews? For a terrific example, we turn to Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery concern of some sort that tried to buffalo RealSelf (a review site and community focused on elective surgery) into taking down negative reviews. Not satisfied with litigation, Lifestyle Life also started adding bogus positive reviews on RealSelf, and engaged in a widespread campaign across the internet to try and control the messaging around its product. Going a step beyond reviews, the company created false websites, including the one below, which purports to be a review of the potential for cosmetics lawsuits that concludes it’s not worth going after Lifestyle Lift because the product is just so, well, great:

Happily, this campaign didn’t escape notice for long, and – in what looks to be the first litigation of its kind – Lifestyle Lift was prosecuted for astroturfing by the New York Attorney General’s office. The company is paying $300K in penalties and agreed to stop its astroturfing ways. For more amusing examples of the lengths Lifestyle Lift went to in its attempt to control its online identity, check out this wonderful collection(pdf) assembled by the NYAG.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 9:27 am by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under Josh King Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.