According to Joe Brockmeier at ZDNet, Amazon is taking an open source approach to PR:
The company has announced what it calls its “Holiday Customer Review Team.” These are six Amazon customers who are particularly active in writing product reviews that it has offered to reporters to discuss gift picks. (They also contribute their recommendations on a page on Amazon’s site.)
Amazon says that members of the team are “real people giving unbiased advice to fellow consumers. They are not employed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.”
Have to admit this a twist on open source PR I hadn’t considered. However, more interesting for me was that it seemed to provide more evidence of the potential power of Most Frequent Contributors. I am curious to know whether Amazon will also have a page where these reviewers highlight their “Xmas turkeys”. In order to show real independence, you’d want them to give you guidance about things to avoid as well as check out.
Nevertheless, I’m going to keep an eye on how this open source experiment progresses.