Amazon: say what you think about Echo, as long as you like it

Those of you who know me know that I abhor what I call “marketing in-authenticity”. You know what that is: the uncomfortable feeling you have when you suspect there’s daylight between some marketing claim and the reality of a product. Or the cheesy feeling — the inkling you are being manipulated — when people (today, mostly Millennials sitting behind a display running TweetDeck who think “social” is a noun) ask for a recommendation tweet or review. You know what they want you to say — and most people either comply, more or less wholeheartedly, or just say nothing.

Not me. (No surprise.)

Today I received an email from Amazon trolling for a review of the Echo (click on the screen snippet below to enlarge it). Note the time stamp: 1:11pm.

 

Being me, I had already written a review of the Amazon Echo here (my stats show Amazon people were all over this review for days after it first went up) and decided to repost it on amazon.com, as per Amazon’s kind invitation. It was immediately rejected, as you can see in the time stamp below when you click on the image.

I suspect a bot running in — what else? — AWS didn’t like either the fact I gave it two stars or, more probably, it was the external link I included. Whatever it was, now Amazon has two problems. One, I don’t think much of the Echo. Two, they now have to suffer the infinitesimally small embarrassment of responding to this post.

I know calling out a Goliath like Amazon means nothing, changes nothing. But I just can’t help suspecting they really don’t want to hear anything but raves about what is, after all, a $10 kitchen timer gone bat-shit.