Reading KVR has made me think about this a lot. If you spend any time there, you know that the board is dominated by a small number of very opinionated but generally knowledgeable posters whose commonality is a fascination (obsession?) with plugins. Less-experienced users often rely on those writers' opinions to make buying decisions. I have seen products both boosted beyond their deserved status and killed dead by those posters.
But after awhile you start to ask yourself whether those opinions are really objective. There are certain developers who hang out on kvr that the core posters really like, and to them those devs cannot do any wrong. So are their products really being objectively evaluated, or is there a bias toward likable developers? Is some of it even actual collusion?
There have been incidents of blatant sock-puppetry, but I think an inspired marketer could devise a marketing campaign that could manipulate that group without appearing to be puppetry. After all, when you're being manipulated by a true master of the craft, you won't KNOW you're being manipulated at all. When you describe someone as being "manipulative", you're usually describing a failed manipulator whose methods were not clever enough to escape detection.
I would suggest that a) we aren't always aware of the extent to which our opinions are being shaped by online opinions, and b) that at least some of the time those opinions are being influenced surreptitiously and deliberately.
BTW, I don't think Cakewalk engages in such underhanded tactics. Either that or they're very, very good at it, which I doubt. A company that comes up with "DAW 2.0" - only to have it repeatedly ridiculed - is, I think, a company we can trust.
Or did Cakewalk pay me to say that?