In the business world you can get in big time trouble for false advertising or falsifying testimonials and other marketing materials. The web is no different. Many companies think it is OK to make up a testimonial here or there because on the web no one is going to know the difference. That is not the case anymore.
The company Lifestyle Lift was recently fined $300,000 in New York for Astroturfing on the Internet. Several memos were discovered that encouraged employees to pose as satisfied customers and post testimonials on forums, social media sites, and their own site.
The company was also found to have created additional sites appearing to be not affiliated with them. Many of these were forum sites but negative comments about the company were deleted from the site to skew the opinions to favor Lifestyle Lift.
The moral of the story is do not falsify your testimonials, online or offline. The backlash from people finding out could be much worse than any of the so called benefits.
Tags: astroturfing, false advertising, testimonials, unethical, web content