Microsoft and Nokia said to post 'astroturfed' comments on negative review of Lumia 800

By Preston Gralla

Microsoft and Nokia employees may have posted negative comments about an online review slamming the Windows Phone 7.5-based Nokia Lumia 800, while hiding their true identities. Given that the review was a truly terrible piece of journalism and analysis, why would the companies even bother?

The review and comments were posted at the the India site Moneylife.in. How bad was the review? The reviewer admits in the review that he wrote it based only on specs, and not on actually using the phone.

That's just a start. He then writes it as a comparison review to the Samsung Galaxy S Plus, and the review reads as if he never actually used that phone as well. Finally, in his conclusion, he says that the Lumia 800 can't compete with the iPhone, even though he doesn't mention the iPhone a single time in the review, or compare it to the Lumia 800 until the conclusion.

As one might expect, the online comments about the review were not kind, and justifiably so. Here are a few typical comments:

"Idiot review. Use the phone before you write a review."

"This 'review' is a disgrace. It's time for a new career choice, my friend."

The reviewer's author, Yogesh Sapkale, claims that several of the comments were posted by Microsoft and Nokia employees, without revealing their employers' names. In an article he writes:

"This review ruffled some feathers and we saw an orchestrated pile of comments. The common factor in all these comments was use of abusive language that explains the motive."

(By the way, let me say from long personal experience that "abusive language" aimed at reviewers does not require an orchestrated conspiracy. It's par for the course. Write a review and no matter what you write, expect to be called names you haven't heard since junior high school.)

Sapkale quotes one commenter, Harish, as writing:

What an crap review!! it's one of the best phone available, iphone is so dumb compared to this.... Guess some one is paying you lumpsum, congrats..

Harish, he claims, posted from a machine with the IP address 192.100.117.41, which is owned by Nokia.

A commenter named Aditya Agrawal also posted negative comments about the review, and Sapkale claims his comments were posted from the IP address 207.46.55.31 which belongs to Microsoft.

If it's true that Microsoft and Nokia employees were posting "astroturfed" comments, the question is why. The review was a transparently poor piece of journalism, and plenty of people ended up lambasting it. There was certainly no need for the companies to risk their reputation aiming at it.

My guess is that if they were Microsoft and Nokia employees doing the posting, they were doing it on their own, not at the behest of their companies. Microsoft and Nokia would do well to track down the truth, and apologize if employees did in fact post negative comments without identifying their employers.