Testimonial - Customer Testimonials

Customer Testimonials

Testimonials from customers who are not famous have been effectively used in marketing for as long as marketing has existed. A past or current customer will present a formal "word of mouth" testimonial that a business can use in marketing and to build trust with future customers. Though testimonials are incredibly effective when believed true, a challenge lays in having the audience believe that testimonials presented by a business are given by real people, and not fabricated by the business itself. Even so, testimonials, reviews, and case studies are still considered by most marketing experts to be the most effective means of marketing and gaining brand trust by small- and medium-sized businesses.

Testimonials have reached an all time high in importance as the internet is now a plethora of reviews (synonymous with testimonials). Websites such as Yelp!, Google+, TripAdvisor, and many more have become 'go to' places for individuals who are seeking other customers reviews/testimonials about a particular business. To put the growth of this industry into perspective, look at Yelp.com's growth alone: Yelp.com has more than 71 million monthly unique visitors as of January 2012

The downside to such explosive importance in this arena is the massive amount of fraud in the form of "fake reviews" or "opinion spam". Simply put, testimonials that are not authentic. Often a business owner will open multiple email addresses and then corresponding Yelp accounts and write a multitude of testimonials seemingly by many customers of said business. Similarly, the same owner may also write negative reviews of his competitors businesses. Additionally, as per the authentic testimonials blog "Just do a search on the recent phenom website fiverr.com using the search term “testimonial” or “review” and there are almost 5,000 results of people offering to “write great testimonial for your product or service”. From a NY Times article about the same topic “...On another forum, Digital Point, a poster wrote, “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor.” A Craigslist post proposed this: “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.”(1)(2) There are tens-of-thousands of ads out there all over the internet of people requesting you to write bogus reviews for their business and people offering to do the same."

There have also been allegations that review sites themselves are prepared to manipulate reviews in return for companies buying advertising subscriptions, with a class action being filed against Yelp to this effect in February 2010.

While a few Universities and Corporations are working on a method to defeat these fake reviews, it seems none have yet been successful to any degree that we can rely on.