Sunday, June 26, 2011
Trusting "Customer" Reviews
I came across an article on www.paidcontent.org regarding the supposed independence of the top reviewers on Amazon.com. It is evident that reviews from other people are powerful in helping buyers shape decisions; good reviews for your product or business on Yelp or Amazon inevitably help drive more business. This is because buyers trust people like them as opposed to professional marketers. However, it seems that the top reviewers on Amazon, and probably Yelp, are not necessarily people like them. The freebies that go to top reviewers, who aren't paid, are strong encouragement for those reviewers to keep the positive reviews flowing. Anecdotally, a friend of mine told me that Yelp began punishing top-rated restaurants who chose not to pay to show up in their "Sponsored Results" section in their search. Apparently, he said that those restaurants ratings immediately began to drop or show up lower in the search results. I don't know if that's true but it does raise a larger issue for customers - can you really trust reviews? On the other hand, it raises an avenue for us as marketers - if providing free products to top reviewers results in positive reviews, it could be a good marketing investment.
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I think that this can be applied to the blogging world as well. We learned in marketing class that many of the top bloggers on the internet receive free products because the companies want them to promote their brand to their readers. As a blogger, a relationship with certain companies may hurt the integrity of reviews you give on your brand. On the other hand, if you continue to remain objective, blog marketing is highly effective because you already have a captive audience with specific shared interests. For instance, my younger sister writes a blog that is popular amongst teenage girls. She focused on fashion, food and pop culture and sometimes has restaurants and TV shows offer her free products for mentioning them. Great idea for companies, but makes the writer's life harder in terms of developing unbiased content.
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