After Receiving 30 Tweets From a Self-Published Author, We Have a Response
After our video on incentivized reviews went viral, we’ve spent a lot of time reading through the responses and helping folks better understand our product. Most commenters were patient and only sent one question at a time, however self-published Author David Gaughran sent us 30 tweets requesting a response.
David Gaughran is a self-published author on Amazon who writes books on how to become a self-published author on Amazon. I guess we can’t say anything since we specialize on reviewing reviews.
Let’s look at his first tweets:
The report that David is questioning is this one: http://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B005DC68NI
A few things to note:
- The Preliminary Report (and the one that David is complaining about) came back as a “Warn”. (Not a “Fail”, a “Warn”). We’re pretty clear that our Preliminary reports aren’t 100% accurate, we’re working on improving them, and we always recommend running a full report if you’re not satisfied with the results.
- When the full report was completed, it came back as a “Pass”.
We are now filtering this out, however, we often see very suspicious reviewers regurgitate the same marketing language word-for-word in their reviews. (eg. “I really loved this pair of Inner Ear Bluetooth Headphones with Bass Boost Technology™”). This is why we have 12 different tests since no one single test is perfect on it’s own.
We’ve seen countless examples where very suspicious reviewers are going around rating all products from a specific brand very highly. Again, not always 100% perfect, but that’s why we have 12 tests.
Don’t forget about that part in the video where we say “If you aren’t satisfied with our analysis, you can adjust our weighting and adjust based on your own personal preferences”.
We already do this, it’s called “One-Hit Wonders” under “Suspicious Reviewers”. Read more here.
I don’t believe that would be very strong evidence of biased reviews. Individuals tend to reuse the same words in their speech. We look at shared phrases between reviewers for the same product since this would be more telling if reviewers are copy/pasting reviews or if they are all written by the same person.
Do you mean that one reviewer leaves all their reviews on a single day? We already do that with “Single-Day Reviewers” – Or do you mean when a product receives most of it’s reviews on a few days? Because we already do that too with our Rating Trend test.
The word “fake” is not mentioned a single time on the page you are referring to. Read more about why we don’t use the word fake.
The Takeaway
We absolutely appreciate any and all feedback about our tool since we’re always looking to improve things, however it might be more effective to use the Contact Us form instead of tweeting at us 30 times.
There’s been some controversy over our reports in the last week, mostly stemming from our failure to properly educate our visitors about what our product is. By no means is ReviewMeta.com definitive proof of fake reviews; it’s a tool that helps you understand where the reviews are coming from and an estimation as to whether or not we believe them to be natural.
Rereading this after 3 years, it seems clear to me that your serial Tweeter got just what he wanted — a whole lotta attention & even an entire blog post devoted to his comments. ?♂️
Amazingly, this also makes RM look even better now.
I would have been interested in an actual debate, and if you hadn’t been so selective in your choice of tweets, your readers would have seen where I said that I felt a product like this was badly needed, and I would wholeheartedly support your efforts if it actually worked.
You also cut the tweets where I offered to help, made positive suggestions to make ReviewMeta better, and offered up my own books as guinea pigs. It appears you are only interested in publicity, rather than making something which works.
If anyone wants to read the full conversation they can do so here: https://storify.com/DavidGaughran/reviewmeta-is-not-ready-yet
Sorry, we didn’t have time to respond to each and every one – there is a link in the article that shows every single one. We responded to the tweets that we felt the need to address. We appreciate that you feel the product is needed.
Regarding: “We’ve seen countless examples where very
suspicious reviewers are going around rating all products from a
specific brand very highly.”
With books, people do tend to be loyal to particular authors, and especially series. Perhaps you should test splitting authors off from brands for this measure.
David Gaughran is a very respected advocate for writers, and I consider him one of the most ethical voices in the indie publishing world. I think the intentions of your tool are excellent, and hope maybe you’ll sit down with Gaughran and have a discussion about how to improve it with some of his suggestions.