If you write anywhere online, sooner or later someone will ask you to promote a product or service. You may get offered products to review, often with the understanding that the product is yours to keep after your review goes up. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you blog, run an online newsletter or just a sporadically updated site — I’ve even heard of people getting offered products to review through their Twitter accounts.

Accepting products and services indiscriminately may not be as fun as it’s cracked up to be. There are more than a few concerns worth considering ahead of time; if you can set a standard policy ahead of time, you can save yourself plenty of stress.

The Question of the Nice Review

When a company hands out products for review, they’re pretty clear upfront that they want a positive review. If you pan every product they send you, they’ll stop sending you free stuff. Considering how much we all like free stuff, there’s some pressure to write mostly positive reviews. But an automatically positive review doesn’t necessarily help you or your readers. Sure, free stuff may keep coming your way, but if your readers pick up a poor product based on your advice, your credibility is going to drop. Furthermore, if you just review anything you can get your hands on, it’s unlikely that all of your reviews will actually be relevant to your target market.

That said, I did read an interesting take on the positive review from blogger Aaron Brazell, who was invited to the Palm Pre pre-launch event last week:

The conversation that night was around what kind of review I’d provide of the unit. Sprint never asked for a positive review but assumed I would provide a review and only wanted fairness out of me. I explained that in my role as a “signal filter”, I would not guarantee a review but I wouldn’t write a negative review. If it’s not a good product, then my audience does not need to even hear about it. The only reason they need to hear about a product is if the product is going to help them run their businesses better.

It’s not a policy that will work for every blog. But it’s a consistent policy that works well with the way Aaron works. The consistency is, perhaps, even more important than picking a stance on how you will review products.

Adding Transparency to Reviews

Another major issue when it comes to online reviews is transparency on the part of the reviewer. The fact of the matter is that just about anyone is more inclined to offer a good review of something that they received free of cost than if they have to pay for it. A free product can have far more drawbacks before it starts to irritate a user than if that same user had to shell out hard-earned cash for it. More than a few people can have conflicts of interest when writing reviews, as well: even something as simple as adding an affiliate link to a review can make the writer’s interest in offering a good review suspect.

All that boils down to a consensus, at least among many writers online, that it’s important to disclose information about why you’re writing a particular review. It doesn’t have to be a formal declaration — adding a line to a blog post along the lines of “So-and-so sent me a free review copy” can be more than enough. But that short line can be surprisingly important. Disclosing such information should be a key part of any review policy.