Building Mac Community through Bribery
There is a growing number of Macintosh oriented software reseller sites that offer extreme discounts for short periods of time. MacZot is one of them and one I’m most familiar with and I have worked with vendors who have had excellent results in building their user bases.
I clicked through a promo to MacUpdate Promo today on an offer for Pixelmator, an image editing product. An offer on the page concerns me if anyone at MacUpdate perceives ethical issues with bribing for comments.
The page doesn’t provide very much information about the product – however I found a facinating offer on the page:
MacUpdate is giving away 1 copy of this promo to people who post comments below. Write a comment about today’s promo, and it could be you! Winners are notified immediately.
Some sites like Amazon or Mirye allow you to comment on a product if you are registered. Our own process through Mirye lets us determine if a review is relevant or not since we can confirm ownership.
If you haven’t thought this one through, what’s happening on MacUpdate is that participants do not have to be owners or even evaluators to comment. This leads to ethical concerns regarding this sort of promotion:
-If ownership is not a criteria for participation – what value are the comments in evaluating the promotion for product purchase? There were commenters who did buy the product and gave positive responses as well as undefined comments.
-Not knowing the conditions upon which their comments will be evaluated in order to get the prize – would that not impact the type of comments left?
-If the quoted message above disappears after the special offer is over – yet the comments remain as pages which in turn are indexed and page ranked, you could draw the conclusion that MacUpdate Promo has an uninfluenced and enthusiastic participant community. Potential participating vendors in future promotions that see this comment list could make decisions about using the promotion site – under the assumption that the site isn’t bribing commenters.
Bribery for information is nothing new and there isn’t necessarily always an ethical issue surrounding it. Many partners I have worked with and weekly industry magazines offer a raffle like bribe to survey participants – win the Amazon or Starbucks gift certificate or a chance at an iPod to complete the survey. Such surveys are often for internal use and have very specific and filtered participation to gather unbiased information.
This promotion technique doesn’t seem entirely honest – to potential buyers or to potential participating vendors. I would be happy to hear from the MacUpdate site what their reasoning is behind this.
