Session Blog Reviews

Posts Tagged ‘Research’

The forthcoming 2010 Social Shopping Study by PowerReviews shows a marked increase in consumer trust in and reliance on online product reviews. However, their trust isn’t blind—online consumers are also becoming more skeptical of those reviews, willing to take them with a grain of salt. The majority of online consumers use reviews as research, and more people are reading more and more reviews. Reports MediaPost : Results from the 2010 survey indicate that 57% of shoppers trust customer reviews as a research source along with other corroborating information, but 35% question whether they are biased. Factors that degrade trust in reviews suggest that 50% do not provide enough reviews to make an educated decision, 39% doubt they are written by real customers, and 38% said a lack of negative reviews or limited information. . . . The survey indicates that consumers trust reviews more now than in 2007. About 41% of survey respondents said they read between four and seven reviews in 2010 before they felt comfortable with a purchase, down from 46% in 2007; 17% vs. 28% read between two and three; 27% vs. 17% read between eight and 15; 7% vs. 3% between 16 and 25, respectively. Six in ten consumers research for a week or more before a purchase decision, though almost 30% only research a few hours. Although they don’t always believe what they read, credibility is one of the top reasons why people prefer to research online rather than talk to a sales associate. Nearly two in three consumers spend at least 10 minutes reading customer reviews. The survey was conducted with over 1000 consumers who shop at least quarterly and spend at least $250 annually online. What do you think? How can customer reviews help your clients (or you)?

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More People Believe Online Reviews

“Andy, when are you going to add Google Buzz monitoring to Trackur?” I think Google Buzz was barely a couple of days old, when I was first asked that question. My response? I wanted to wait and see how (if) people used Google Buzz, before deciding to jump on the bandwagon that other tools were so quickly willing to hitch a ride on. Now–I’m trying to not look so smug–it appears that decision was a fortuitous one. PostRank is reporting that 89% of all content on Google Buzz is simply the duplication of stuff that can be found in Twitter or via blog feeds: In other words, just 10% of the content posted to Google Buzz has the potential to be unique. Adding Google Buzz to Trackur would result in more noise and less signal . Add to that the fact that Google Buzz’s buzz has pretty much fizzled and it’s hard to see where the value is in the service–as a user or as a monitoring firm. How are you using Google Buzz? Are you syndicating your other content or are you using it to create new stuff?

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11% Original Content + 89% Duplicate Content = Google Buzz

Social media is expanding the power of word of mouth marketing. But as always, WOM is hard to measure. Forrester is attempting to rectify that with their latest measure, Peer Influence Analysis . In keeping with traditional WOMM thought, Forrester says that Mass Influencers, who make up just 16 percent of all online Americans, are responsible for 80 percent of the brand impressions in online social settings. But the big winner is Facebook: Of all the social influence impressions, Forrester found that 256B were on social networks, and another 1.64B were on other forms of social media (including blogs). Forrester divides the Mass Influencers into two groups: Mass Connectors and Mass Mavens (3.7% of the online population falls into both categories). Mass Connectors have a lot of online friends—537 total across all networks, Forrester reports. Mass Mavens are people with a high level of expertise in their field. While Mass Mavens are driven to collect and share facts and opinions, Mass Connectors are driven to know others. Naturally, both frequently post about products and services. As always, Influencers are the Holy Grail of WOMM. Unfortunately, Forrester doesn’t offer a whole lot of advice on finding those influencers. However, once you find them, Forrester says, don’t just use the same campaigns you’d use with the rest of your social media efforts, or with your “social broadcasters”: Social Broadcasters are the “famous” individuals in your market, like Robert Scoble or Michael Arrington for consumer electronics. While they can achieve a great number of impressions, they cannot equal the power of unleashing thousands and millions of Mass Influencers. You need separate programs for Social Broadcasters and Mass Influencers. What do you think? How do you find influencers? Are they still as influential as this study indicates?

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80% of Online Influence Comes from 16% of Users (But Facebook’s the Big Winner)

Buying ads on Facebook works! According to Facebook. OK, so the social network asked Nielsen to conduct the study , but I can’t help be somewhat skeptical of the results . Me? Skeptical? Who knew? The study looked at the brand recall of 800k Facebook users and ads from 14 different brands across a range of categories. The conclusion appears to be that Facebook ads can help increase brand awareness and recall, when combined with naturally occurring endorsements: Facebook-home-page ads on average generated a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent..the increase in recall jumped to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds. Brand awareness saw similar bumps: up 2% from just a home-page ad, 8% with a “social ad” bearing mentions of friends who were brand fans and up 13% when a home-page ad appeared along with a mention of friends who were brand fans in the users’ news feeds. Yay for advertising! Well, don’t be too quick to take these results at face value. After all, it’s kind of like Google saying AdWords ads are more effective when you are already #1 in the organic results. Erm, isn’t most of the heavy-lifting being done by the organic listing? It seems Nielsen’s own study suggests this may be in play for Facebook ads: Of the 18 million users exposed to the ads, only around 130,000, or less than 1%, “engaged” with them by clicking on them. But around 40,000 [of a group of 1 million], or around 4%, of users who saw organic mentions of their friends become brand fans clicked on those news items. In other words, those that only saw the organic were 4 times more engaged than those that only saw the ads. Doesn’t that mean we should spend our money on social media marketing –building communities, engaging customers, etc–as opposed to just simply throwing money at Faceless Facebook ads? Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

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Facebook Ads Work Great…Says Facebook

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