Reverb Communications Posting Positive Reviews on the App Store for Clients

In exchange for $0.75 per app sale on Apple’s App Store, Reverb Communications, a public relations firm, offers their clients a slew of services, amongst which is a group of interns that post positive reviews of their clients’ apps on the App Store and on Internet forums, according to a tip sent to TechCrunch. TechCrunch did their own research and found several iTunes accounts that only reviewed the apps of Reverb Communications’s clients and that wrote only positive, fire-star reviews of these apps. Reverb Communications’s response denies that they have a team writing positive reviews for clients and claims that the tip must have come from a malevolent former Reverb employee.

While such a practice can boost the sales of an app and help it get off the ground when it first launches, it is bound to reflect poorly on the PR firm and its clients when it is finally discovered. The clients are also partly responsible because Reverb Communications was rather candid about this practice (at least that is how it appears from the leaked document, which describes this service in detail) and yet some of its clients have been with the firm for years. Reverb’s clients were at best ignorant or, at worst, supportive of Reverb’s actions. Either way, we will probably see many of Reverb’s clients crying foul and claiming that they were completely unaware that Reverb was doing this. It will be interesting to see if Reverb will continue to actively deny this claim or if it will sit quiet and hope this all dies down soon and to see whether they will cease this practice.