Belkin, the manufacturer of computer equipment, was recently caught paying for fake positive reviews for their products on Amazon.

This all came to light when a blogger found a listing on Amazon’s ‘mechanical turk’ system, where users list simple online jobs and pay people to complete them. An employee of Belkin, Mike Bayard, offered to pay .65¢ for each positive review for one of their products. “Give [it] a 100% rating (as high as possible),” Mike posted on the site, “write as if you own the product and are using it…mark any other negative reviews as ‘not helpful’ once you post yours.”

The blogger posted the story, which quickly got picked up on Slashdot, Digg, Engadget and other major social media sites. This, in turn, drew attention from print and television media, and Belkin had a major PR disaster on their hands. It’s not that Belkin is the only company doing this – there are several others under suspicion – but it does bring up the question of ethics in social media.

Since Mojave is an agency that helps companies use social media to reach customers, ethics is something we take very seriously. Early on, we set the mandate that we will not mislead or create fake users to push an agenda. Of course, we use tools to publish and distribute a campaign, but we will NOT create fake 5-star reviews posing as a customer. It’s dangerous and undermines what’s great about social media in the first place.

Our strategies work by reveling aspects of your brand that can be activated through social media, then identifying brand loyalists and empowering them to spread the word for you online. It’s our belief that good marketing can only accelerate the truth; and by amplifying this in your brand, we give people a reason to pass something along. Remember, even before there was anything called ‘social media’, customers would pass on information they found compelling or useful.

We believe there will be more and more backlash against companies that mislead customers through social media, and call on all agencies and marketers to take the high road and adopt strict ethic codes for their online strategies.