Neowin reported earlier today that, an annoyed Carbonite customer who wanted to write reviews in Amazon.com regarding his experiences with Carbonite, found out that the high level employees of carbonite gave positive product reviews disguised as normal users.
The Carbonite group later replied back to me via Twitter:
It looks like they have updated their disclosure policy now. Carbonite"s CEO Dave has stated that the company did not have specific policies in place regarding employee engagement in reviews earlier but now these policies are put into place to reflect their commitment to disclosure and transparency online.
As we were just emerging as a company at that time, we did not have specific policies in place regarding employee engagement in reviews. In 2007, we put these policies into place to reflect our commitment to disclosure and transparency online. Since that time, I believe Carbonite employees have been scrupulous about following our policies. Carbonite employees are quite active on the blogs and know that they are to identify their Carbonite affiliation. We"re making sure that any old blog posts from 2006 are removed and apologize if anyone was misled by them.
— Dave
CEO, Carbonite