Category Archives: Business

How will product reviews evolve?

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There was a great question on the G+ site yesterday from Daniel Zahler Portfolio Manager at Venture Quest Capital Partners asking two things about product reviews. (1) How will online product reviews need to evolve (e.g. format, accessibility, virality, credibility) and (2) what role will they play in the next wave of social commerce? My answer (draft form so feel free to add comments) below:

Hi Daniel, the best folks to answer your question are probably the 3rd party providers in this market such as PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice. However I will use my experience in managing the generation of reviews and guides for eBay’s price comparison portal Shopping.com for the last 15 months to base my response, which cost a lot less cash and helped drive my understanding of these issues working with my colleagues in DE, FR, AU and US (including product review site Epinions.com).

And what I’d say is that the evolution of product reviews is closely tied to the evolution of the whole business of social ratings and social recommendations. Practically every week I talk to or come across a new solution which claims to be the next big thing in this space. And of course this is closely tied to the post F8 world. I also know that on TV in the UK on Monday there’s an investigative documentary of the impact TripAdvisor reviews can have on hotels’ ability to generate new customers, so your question could not be more timely.

So back to your question, how will they evolve? Well have a read of my blog post on Google’s ZMOT, other known as the ‘zero moment of truth’ when shoppers access reviews to make purchasing decisions – and ask yourself when everything from pencils to hotels can and will be reviewed and accessed on the go, via your smartphone – that this suggests (coupled with the way Facebook is evolving..) a certain frictionless social shopping context necessary to understand the evolution of product reviews, particularly if you are new to the marketplace. It’s easier to answer the question more specifically with a given product in a given marketplace too.

In conclusion a quote from Google’s ZMOT: “Yes, people take the time to leave messages online about how much they love Scotch Tape. That’s because the effort is down to zero.”

Are you listening hard enough?

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A while ago I went for an interview at social commerce innovators mydeco, who I really admire. I don’t recall who interviewed me at mydeco I do recall the useful feedback, which was that I listened too much in my interview. Funnily enough at a Shopping.com offsite in late 2010 in sunny Marbella I highlighted “listening” as a key strength during a cross-company workshop.

At a more recent meeting with a social media guru he asked me hypothetically what  I would say to a tea retailer client, armed with market research data which showed their customers drank a lot of tea at midnight. He believed the right answer was to advice the client that they need to produce a low-caffeine tea to meet the late night tea behaviour need.

My answer (OK, polished up a tad in hindsight) would be to make the strategic assumption that the tea customers knew they were drinking normal caffeinated tea at midnight; and start a discussion with the customers on that basis, before talking to the client as to how to develop their offering. How does that sound?

My one-liner taken from the '60 Insights from Experienced Community Managers eBook' published by Blaise Grimes-Viort

The value of listening in building a community isn’t just in terms of you as a CMO listening to what your customers say; it’s also the same mechanism which drives the value of a community in the interactions between members. Take the example of Stocktwits which I blogged about in 2008, and which I heard recently has also invested in UK-based City Index – currently loooking to recruit a social media planner. To quote Roger Ehrenberg, founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures from that time:

“Stocktwits massively leverages the power of the long tail, but the reason followers are able to rapidly identify value is because of reputation.

“THE STOCKTWITS COMMUNITY IS A MERITOCRACY. Those that hem and haw and say little don’t get followed. Those who are insightful, sharp and decisive command large readership. And this is the way it should be.

“We’ve only just seen the tip of the iceberg of what the Stocktwits community can and will become.  But the power of the platform is clear.”