Dear Dave Balter,
November 28th, 2005
I’m confused. I just finished your book, Grapevine, and couldn’t help but scratch my head when I read, at the bottom of page 50, these words:
Like phony reviews that are often posted by authors’ friends and enemies on amazon.com, this attempt at creating positive word-of-mouth through a totally fabricated event devalued the entire conversation and made its developers look bad.
And then you posted on the BzzAgent blog – which I assume is widely read by your BzzAgents - on Thursday, November 3, this message:
Grapevine is released today. First day you can post a review on Amazon [I've hated seeing the book up there with no reviews].
Somehow, at least to me, the ideas behind those two statements contradict one another.
I’ll post my complete thoughts on Grapevine later this week.
Other posts by Spike.
Olivier Blanchard says:
This ought to be good.
February 21st, 2006 at 7:44 amDave Balter says:
Hey Spike – Thanks for the thoughts and the read of Grapevine. Hope you enjoyed, and appreciate you giving it a good editorial scrubbing – I’m glad you noted this passage and the BzzAgent reviews on Amazon. Some may call this semantics, but the difference between the “phony” Amazon reviews I mentioned in Grapevine and those that were posted by actual BzzAgents are two very different beasts. The first relates to authors who actually ask friends to post anonymously good things about their books [or, as many found out, authors posting their own wonderful reviews anonymously]. This deception – and clear bias – is what causes deterioration of Word of Mouth as a medium. In the case of Grapevine and BzzAgents, we didn’t ask anyone to pretend to be anonymous readers or fool others, but rather we suggested that individuals who had actually read the book review it – whether good or bad [some less-than-stellar 3-star reviews certainly prove this point]. And, as hopefully everyone knows by now, we insist that agents reveal their campaign affiliation. The difference of disclosure is critical here, as is the articulation of only true, honest opinions. Happy to discuss more at the WOMMA conference in January. See you soon! Dave
February 21st, 2006 at 7:44 amSpike Jones says:
Dave – Thanks for the response. (I’m blown away at this fancy internet thing – how I can post something one morning and get a response that afternoon without even emailing you.) And thanks for the rebuttal. What I would say in response that in posting on your blog, you were encouraging your BzzAgents to go and post a review on Amazon.com. I’m of the camp that believes that most of your agents are predisposed to liking you and BzzAgent and do feel more compelled to give positive responses (or no response at all if they don’t like the free product they receive). As I write this, there are 42 responses on Amazon to your book. Twenty-one of those admit they are BzzAgents (I’m sure there’s more that don’t fess up). Out of those 21, nine are five-stars, seven are four-stars and five are three-stars (and they don’t say anything bad about the book). The fact that you asked them to post responses is what I see as a contradiction to your book. Why did you feel you needed to ask them to post? I don’t want to get into a full-blown debate here, and I appreciate your thoughtful and prompt response, but I still see the two statements you made as going against one another.
February 21st, 2006 at 7:46 amDJ says:
Like Gramps told me, don’t listen to what he says, watch what he does. Not quite as bad as friends posting anonymously, but close. Call it the shillin’ of the willin’. At the least, the gray area has gotten a lot grayer. After all, who’s gonna risk the free swag by slamming the book the boss wrote? To paraphrase Clemenceau, “average customer review” is too important to be left to the general public.
February 21st, 2006 at 7:58 amAndy Sernovitz writes WOMM book at ViralMeister says:
[...] Andy may however want to avoid some of Dave Balter’s word of mouth strategies when it comes to promoting his book, particularly when it comes to Amazon reviews (see here). Then again there’s no shortage of new WOMMA members wanting speaker engagements for Andy to be certain of some positive feedback [...]
August 30th, 2006 at 11:51 am