Recently the popular user-review site Yelp.com announced that it had proof that some of the reviews posted on its site were bought. Yelp quickly took steps to publicly identify some of these miscreants by posting warning messages alongside the fake reviews, using a “badge of shame” approach. For three months, Yelp will display an “alert” on the offending company’s profile page that says: “We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business!”  A sample of the warning message is shown below.

You may recall a post that I wrote this June titled “Money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you like!” It talked about celebrities and companies buying Twitter “followers” and Facebook “likes” to beef up their profiles.

Is there a grey area here?

While buying fake reviews is downright dishonest, can we cast companies and people who buy “followers” and “likes” in the same light? If you are the CEO of a large corporation and you are new to Twitter, can you afford to be perceived as having only five followers, one of whom is your mother?

Does this make you think?

Perhaps, the fiasco at the highly-rated restaurant that you picked to impress your girlfriend was not your fault after all! Does this mean that you cannot trust recommendations from strangers, even when there appears to be a large number of them?

As the saying goes, “It’s about quality, not quantity.” While I agree that the quality of the reviews and followers is important, you cannot ignore quantity. If you are looking up movie reviews on rottentomatoes.com and find two great reviews for movie 1 and twenty-five good-to-great reviews for movie 2, which one would you pick? If the two reviews for movie 1 were from people who you know and respect; would that change your decision? I would like to say it would!

At the end of the day, social media is about true social reach. In a perfect world, you have reach and credibility. If you are able to combine your reach with your credibility it becomes a powerful tool! So in reality, you do need quality and quantity to have true social reach. President Obama’s tweet following the election victory said “Four more years.” Not exactly profound, but certainly poignant! This tweet and the photograph that accompanied it became the single most re-tweeted message in Twitter history.

Talk about true reach!

Note: Thank you for adding your comments and suggestions. I hope that this post got you thinking…