Here is an interesting video i found on you tube.
It’s often said that “eBay Pinks” get hateful replies to any board posts they either start or engage in. Lets face it, eBay is not a happy place like it was years ago.
It appears that just about every eBay forum has at least one regular poster that is very active, and could be an eBay employee or even a liveworld employee acting as a liaison between the company’s. And could even be a board moderator as well.
This could explain why some members get away with all kinds of crap postings, while others get pink slapped for nearly nothing and wind up with a permanent board suspension. Lets face it, if a moderator gets a stiff one for someone they will look for that members postings and scrutinize every word looking for something that violates policy. Just like a cop you pizzed off lays waiting for you to drive by and give him probable cause to pull you over.
In the below 2 part video eBay’s John Bodine talks about “Seeding the Conversations” among other things, but i don’t see a bunch of Pinks posting regularly on eBay’s boards. They must be all under cover as just another active user.
Reminds me of an old saying we had in the car business “get their confidence, get their trust, and get their money.” And if they misbehave give them the boot!
Just a theory, but It’s interesting material for discussion anyway.
Fake forum comments are ‘eroding’ trust in the web
From http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15869683
Trust in information on the web is being damaged by the huge numbers of people paid by companies to post comments online, say researchers.
Fake posters can “poison” debate and make people unsure about who they can trust, the study suggests.
Some firms have created tens of thousands of fake accounts to flood chat forums and skew debate.
The researchers say there are reliable ways to spot fakes and urge websites to do more to police users.
The researchers from Canada and China say paying people to post comments is an “interesting strategy in business marketing” but it is not a benign activity.
“Paid posters may create a significant negative effect on the online communities, since the information from paid posters is usually not trustworthy,” they wrote.
Battles
In some cases, rival companies have used competing armies of workers to wage comment wars that confused members of the public looking for unbiased information.
The researchers say the fake comments can overwhelm some users, causing them to find it hard to trust any information found online.
They give the example of a spike in activity on a World of Warcraft chat forum on the Chinese website Baidu.
A thread titled “Junpeng Jia, your mother asked you to go back home for dinner!” received over 300,000 replies over a two day period.
A PR company later claimed it had employed 800 individuals to run 20,000 separate accounts on the site to help maintain interest in the videogame while it was down for maintenance.
Growing problem
While the practice of flooding forums with fake comments is most widespread in China, where such posters are called the Internet Water Army, it is becoming common in other nations too.
The US military is known to use fakes to infiltrate chat forums to gather information about potential terror groups.
Similarly many Facebook pages are plagued by bogus friends and “social bots” that are used to stage debates.
Many marketing firms also seed forums with comments in a bid to create “viral” interest in a company or event.
However, fakes can be spotted by analysing their patterns of activity and the words they use, say the researchers.
Fakes are more likely to start new comment threads, make inane comments rather than add to a debate, and repeat former comments with minor changes, the study suggests.
The researchers say they are refining software tools to help website administrators tackle the “painful” problem.
Look what just came in the mail.
http://i.lulzimg.com/e1f9f32c95.png
I guess they do love me after all.
Ho ho ho
That’s Funny!
Hope you don’t mind, I embedded that image in the comment.
Wonder if those t.j.electronics1 victims got their money back?
HoHoHo.. Merry Christmas from eBay and PayPal..
Take a look at this.
ebay forums nothing but a classic poser scam?
Sure looks that way.
” …our LiveWorld moderators or community managers are acting as agents of the brand on the brands digital property, and that not explicitly disclosing that they are paid by LiveWorld is much like a part-time employee/contractor from the brand itself wouldnt be expected to state so”
Bryan Person, March 5, 2010
LiveWorld Social Media Evangelist …”
From the lips of Lieworld
http://bit.ly/kyWcnA