Duh. Duh. Duh. I just keep repeating it in my head, but I mean c’mon it keeps happening, and I don’t think we’re ever going to stop.
I was perusing the App Store on my iPhone yesterday, one of my new “Monday traditions”. I like keeping up-to-date with the Store about once a week (this is a far cry from the 30-40 views per week I was logging when I was schlepping the SkyBOX with Vivid Sky). Man, have I come a far way in a mere 6-months. But, I digress…
I don’t know why development companies, agencies and clients insist on continuing this practice. Shilling, for those of you who have never come across the term, is mis-representing yourself for a product or service you’ve created. Basically, you talk yourself up on-line while producing a crappy/misleading product.
Case in point: the “LUCKY: At Your Service Digital Concierge” by Nearbynow, Inc.
The app was launched on February 2nd, as a partnership between Lucky Magazine and Nearbynow, an online retailer location service. The application’s premise is simple: it allows users to view lists of shoes generated by the editors at Lucky Magazine. Basically, it’s supposed to be a “who’s who” of shoes for the Spring ’09 shopping season. Unfortunately, there are a litany of things making the app “junk-worthy” (currently): it’s “clunky” and prone to system crashes (a common occurrence in “new” iPhone apps); it’s lacking in content and functionality (the app does not even provide a simple search functionality), etc…
Ok, so no worries, you launched a crappy app; we’re human. It’s free, you have nothing to worry about except the amount of time you’ve taken from people. You can handle this, c’mon now, I mean it’s not a terrible premise for an application; we can make it better…
Having done this before, the strategy is simple:
- Update your messaging on the iTunes store (speak directly to your audience)
- Tell your audience you know the app sucks
- Make sure they know your development team is going to start resolving issues
- Release a soft-update goal
- Resolve the friggin’ issues
But what the crew down at Nearbynow, Inc. decided to do was something atrociously more blatant and disgraceful. They knew they had junk, and to try and quell the fears of potential downloaders and get the app abuzz with news, they rated the app so highly and gave it such tremendous accolades that it ended up on the “Featured App” category of the Store. That’s right, thrown out in public for the whole world to download, for free. And man, did they download it.
Below is a scatter-plot chart of the “rating” the Lucky App received via the App Store Review section. Now it has been a while since my last trigonometry class, but I think I know a negative slope when I see one. Notice the 37th review (the review that first noted the preceding reviews might have been by Lucky/Nearbynow employees):
The evidence is pretty simple: immediately after the 37th review the ratings varied greatly. Once the information sank in, users started to grow frustrated, people kept accessing the app with little success and the population decided to speak. They crashed the app’s rating (dragging it all the way to 1.5 stars, arbitrarily). Not only did Lucky/Nearbyme produce a shoddy product, they pissed off a vocal consumer base.
One can argue what was the real cause of the infuriation in the community; the app’s “rating” is an extremely subjective star-rating that is obviously biased both for and against the product. I would venture to say the rating was unnecessarily driven south by the reviewers disenchantment with aforementioned shills.
I reference the review of user Gossip_hound:
“The early reviews are OBVIOUSLY written by Lucky employees. They all even make the same ‘there goes my savings’ jokes. The app is a good idea with terrible execution. It doesn’t work. At all.”
You guys made the same jokes?!?
You can vouch for your company online, but be weary, the law of the masses is nowhere as apparent as it is in a 2.0 world. You, your friends and subsequently your enemies and competitors all have a voice, but that does not even come close to the millions of opinions of on-lookers who will be editorializing your every action.
Release good content with a suitable story and be at the forefront of an evolving media. Fire up your PR machine and tout a product that really falls short of the mark and you run the risk of being lumped in with a bunch of other “crap”.
Peace.
mjb
