Customer Generated Reviews and their effect

Q: Do new customers trust your brand or company before they've ever dealt with you?
A: Possibly, but unlikely. Only if you have done lots to try to pursuade them (this marketing costs money)

Q: Would a potential customer trust your brand or company over another, if someone else positively rated the experience with you?
A: Yes!
Consumers place far more trust in their fellow consumers than they do in traditional marketers and advertisers

Q: Would a negative customer review about a product make you think twice about buying a product?
A: Yes! And there's lots of these about:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006009.html

There use to be a card stuck up on a till in my local Fish & Chip shop in Kent when I was a boy: "If you like our service, tell your friends. If you don't, tell us". However, in the web-enabled world of enhanced communications and consumer opinion, this has evolved: "Satisfied customers tell 3 friends, angry customers tell 3000" (Apols, but this book isn't out yet). Now a single customer with a 'bee in their bonnet' can now tell a significant number of people exactly what they think... and this can affect your brand and even your bottom line, as bad reviews affect sales!

There is nothing you can do to prevent this content from being posted out there, apart from provide 100% customer satisfaction. However you cannot please all your customers all the time and trying to provide this is neither possible nor profitable.

What's worse is that unchecked..... these individuals become the worst sorts of influencers for a company. They become beacons of outrage and this attention may even strengthen their passion.

However, this is not all bad news, you don't have to just fear feedback. Consumer reviews can and should be seen in a positive light. What your user wants should hopefully feedback into your customer research. After all, you would usually pay decent money to a research agency to get the insight into your customer thoughts & behavours. A certain percentage are prepared to provide this for free. Its then deciding who and how to ask that becomes the next problem.

Using the Collective Sentiment

Collective Intelligence taps the expertise of a group rather than the individual, usually to make decisions (not 'design by committe'; but more usually 'if 2 brains are better than 1, then many are better than a few') . However, tapping into the collective sentiment could be aterrible way to gain insight. But doing it timely and in the right way could identify feelings or other tendancies towards companies and their products.


Think of it like a focus group for the 21st Century... your users/consumer/customers all commenting in their own ways about what presses their particular mephoric buttons. Normal people generating pockets of 'buzz' across the digital landscape or alternatively generating misinformation about your products (or you). They blog about their face cream, they twitter about the latest flavour of chicken sauce or they load your company logo to their MySpace area.

Just as some companies use distributed co-creation (user-centred innovation) to solve problems by encouraging feedback and even facilitating changes to products by their users*, we can utilise the people and structures beyond the 'walled garden' of complete influence for PR purposes. Although this is already happening (don't all company PR execs secretly 'lurk' in product discussion areas?), how many companies actually understand and measure the collective comments and sentiment?

*(If you don't believe me, just ask why so many Web2.0 products are in permanent 'beta' .Then look at the requested features list from its top users)

Dear Santa, can you please send me:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wikinomics-Mass-Collaboration-Changes-Everything/dp/1843546361/

One word of warning though:
"Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups" - W. F. Nietzsche