My husband and I were searching for a new area rug, and we could not find anything we liked for a smaller budget. But then I found this rug online. I went to the Home Depot the next day to see it, and it was better than the picture! This rug is nice and dark, with lots of great patterns. We get compliments on it all the time! To find an area rug this size for this price is extremly hard, but we could not be happier with our purchase!

A true handyman knows his equipment and won’t rely on HD for advice, HD has been going down the tank the last few years,. I think they are waiting for someone to buy them out,. Their prices suck.

I agree with Dee. If more people fessed up to cheating the system, versus the system cheating them, this wouldn’t be such a parnoid country.

Had a similar experience with HD and their paid search listings:

http://www.badslacks.com/home-depot-you-can-do-it-they-cant-help/

Maybe the commenter happens to work as an advertising writer?

But yeah, we need at least 3 kinds of identity: totally anonymous, pseudonyms, certified person.

[quote]AlmostAlive wrote:
But who says “smaller budget” in real life — real people say “cheap” or at least “inexpensive” and advertising writers say “smaller budget”.[/quote]

Self promotion, just one of the indispensable spokes in the wheel that is capitalism.

Three possibilities:

1) Home Depot is writing these.

Comment above from directly from Home Depot suggests they are not, and I believe it. Think about it…for this tactic to make any meaningful impact it would have to be so wide spread across categories that this wouldn’t be the first posting about this. And how many corporate employees do you know would have the kind of time or incentive to do this? Let alone, take the job risk (i’m sure they can check IP address).

2) Supplier is writing these

Noted in the post…unlikely since these rugs are from different manufacturers

3) Users are writing these.

My theory is that another user without much creativity grabbed the review from another person to get a review in the system. Therefore it is not necessarily a ‘fraudulent’ review (in the intent of that definition) but rather spam. And if this is the first and only mention of this, probably in the vast minority of honest reviews.

Mat, I’m curious how you propose to solve the problem you see with the ‘Net. From what you said I get the feeling that you believe there should be much more government interference regulation with the internet.

Personally I’m of the opinion that any government involvement would be far less effective and far more costly than the millions of Ben’s out there keeping their eyes on everything and shouting out whenever they see something fishy.

Neither freedom, nor an absence of laws equates to lawlessness as you implied. It can lead to it, but I don’t see the web as the anarchistic frontier where the few powerful “gunslingers” are praying on the poor helpless masses.

The very freedom you seem to fear, and the unprecedented access to information we have right now, is exactly what allows folks like Ben to do what they do so well, call out the fishiness they see.

I think you have too much time on your hands.

Hell yeah. I was a department head at Hell Depot for three years and we all left bogus comments on the HD website. Not only to make our depts look good but because our store manager asked us to, so it would make the store look good.

Simon – thank you for the response from Home Depot. Would you assume that these comments were made by customers then, either being lazy, silly, stupid or trying to game your contest right now?

Ben – The interesting piece to this is that these review fall outside of the contest dates. These are from the first few months of when we had reviews online so it may be a tester, as it was mentioned earlier, or someone trying reviews out for the first time. We also did an IP check and they are from three different IP addresses so it might lend to this hypothesis.

I do appreciate you bringing this to our attention and as a customer centric organization we do value the voice of the customer as part of our greater community on homedepot.ca. When we added reviews we felt that this authentic word of mouth advertising and community building aspect of our website would continue to make us a leading destination for online shopping in Canada and help our customers in making decisions with this powerful user generated content. As many of your readers have pointed out it is important to ensure that the level of trust is maintained or the whole project would be a failure. To ensure this not only do we not post our own reviews on the site or condone over vendors in doing the same but the overall review acceptance process is handled by a third party to ensure our biases are not reflected in the process.

The conversation this post has generated is a great look at the issues we all have as marketers and consumers in the new user generated content world. I think the response shows the value in true user generated content in consumers’ eyes and the need to work hard to maintain this trust.

Thanks,

Simon Rodrigue
Homedepot.ca

Simon – You stated…

“the overall review acceptance process is handled by a third party to ensure our biases are not reflected in the process.”

This is true, and that third party also guarantees that HD cannot obtain any individual customer information such as IP addresses. How exactly did you do an IP address check? Sounds like a little corporate BS to me.

At one time HD was a very customer centric organization, but during their growth stage of the last several years much of that has changed to where they currently have the worst customer service in the industry.

Anyway it’s not like HD would scam customers on purpose.

http://www.nbc4.tv/homedepotinvestigation/index.html

First, Ben – great eyes!

Second, I agree – something stinks. The question remains, though: who stinks? This could be interesting from both points of view. If HD did this, they’re going to look bad for obvious reasons, and they’ll deserve it.

But they’re also likely to look bad if they didn’t do it, and that’s quite a problem, too. Shoot – everyone overlooked the obvious explanation here: Lowes planted the comments and then slipped Ben a few bucks to blow the whistle.

Just kidding, Ben.

I think when all is said and done, the effect of this sort of thing is going to be to erode the credibility of anonymous comments for product reviews. You’re looking at the next “five out of six dentists surveyed…”

http://www.homedepot.ca/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/DisplayTemplate?storeId=10051&catalogId=10051&langId=-15&display=review_landing

JPL – that link didn’t work for me. Can you tell us what we should be seeing there?

I’ve heard of seeding message boards and forums but not familiar with the practice of spamming your own site. (If that is what they were doing.) Your would think they would at least be smart enough to change up the story a little though!

Good insight even though its sad to have online marketing going in that direction.

Cool!

This article is an eye opener for me.

I, myself when I shop for things I always try to make it a point to read the reviews of the products before deciding to buy them.

Now, I won’t believe those reviews right away. Who knows if it’s really true or not.

Ben,

Home Depot Canada is running a contest:

From now until March 31, 2007, for every review you write, you’ll be automatically entered into a weekly draw to win a $500 Home Depot Gift Card.*

People are probably writing multiple bull&^% reviews to get the numbers up.

JPL

Ben – it was in fact our partner that ran the IP lookup for us that ID’d it was not the same user each time; they also believe that it could have been someone testing the system out to see how it works.

As mentioned in my earlier post it is very important for both homedepot.ca, and our 3rd party provider, that the user generated content is trusted and valued and as such we do not create reviews or condone this behaviour from our vendor community. We believe that it is the extended homedepot.ca community and the content that this community generates that will be one the keys that will continue to allow us be one of Canada’s leading online retailers.

In the coming months we are looking forward to expanding our user generated content on homedepot.ca and it will be interesting to see what you and your readers think about the enhancements and new features.

Thanks for the great discussion on this topic, it truly shows the importance of user generated content on a site and we are glad that consumers like yourself took the time to highlight this important issue as community based interactions continue to take a greater importance in the overall online, marketing and customer service strategies.

Thanks,

Simon Rodrigue
Homedepot.ca

How do we know that every single comment on YOUR blog isn’t fake? I mean you obviously know how to not make rookie mistakes now.

This looks very much like a vendor posting reviews about their own product. I am sure Home Depot doesn’t encourage it, but it’s impossible to prevent. The fact that you noticed these reviews and exposed them is a testament to the ability for wise users to ferret out this kind of stuff.

The fact that Home Depot took the time to comment on your blog is very professional. Most companies are completely ignorant of what is written about them in the blogosphere.