The influence of online product reviewers

Rubicon Consulting has written a white paper based on research conducted on US-based web users. Rubicon is run by Nilofer Merchant, with whom I worked in compiling case studies for the book.

There are some important points to pull out from the study. It finds that those people that regularly post reviews and comments are not your average customer, but enthusiasts (or enthusiastic detractors). Some firms may decide that these folk exist at the extreme ends of the customer spectrum, are not typical of general customer, and can therefore be ignored.

This is a mistake: although average customers don’t post reviews they do read them. Importantly, product reviews drive product purchases, so ignoring the review posters is dangerous. As the paper concludes:

“The most frequent contributors are the influencers, and they have a strong influence on purchase decisions because they write most of the online recommendations and reviews.”

This means that firms can’t ignore frequent contributors, but they have to talk to them in a different way to ‘normal’ customers. This is music to my ears, echoing Influencer50’s own mantra of “Don’t pitch to influencers.”

Other findings I picked out include:

• Approaches that work well in one type of community may fail utterly in another. Confirmation of the ‘horses for courses’ guide to influence ecosystems.
• Confirmation of the 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers, 9% of users contribute from time to time, and 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions.
• Influence of product reviews varies by category. You’re more likely to use an online review to buy a digital camera than you are to choose a doctor. (I’m relieved to hear this!)
• Online discussion is theatre: “Web discussion is a performance in which a small group of people interact with each other, and with companies, for the benefit, education, and amusement of everyone else.” Understand this and it shapes your entire approach to online communities.

There is a ton of other information on web usage in the US, which makes interesting reading. For example, the research finds that web users are more likely to vote Democratic. That should be an interesting theory to check in the coming week…

New blogs on the blog roll

Perhaps not newsworthy to everyone, but I've added three new blogs to the roll.

Nilofer Merchant's WinMarkets blog - Nick (I50's founder) and Nilofer met up last week, and Nilofer blogs on the meeting. I can assure you that Nick is not zany (for a Brit anyway) but then the meeting was in the ultra-conservative California...

Ian McKee's The Power of Influence. Ian is CEO of Vocanic, an influencer marketing firm based in Singapore. You should check them out - really interesting stuff.

Marc Duke. Marc is ex-Text100 and Lewis, on the Analyst Relations side. Marc really gets Influencer Marketing. Blog more often, Marc.

On Influencers in consumer markets

Good article here, written by Nilofer Merchant, CEO of Rubicon Consulting. She’s just been inspired by The Influentials, as I was when I read it.

Nilofer makes some interesting points which, despite seemingly focused on consumer markets, apply equally to the B2B market. Specifically:

• Influencers are not (necessarily) journalists and traditional PR targets. In the B2B world we’ve identified more than 20 influencer types.
• Influencers are specific to the market under examination. Just as school advice wouldn’t come from the BBQ expert, so security software influencers don’t normally come from the printer industry. We see that market specialisation also applies to geography and company size (SMBs are different in their influences than enterprises).
• It takes hard work to identify true influencers. Our experience shows that an intuitive guess is no better than 20% correct. Research is the only answer.
• Influencers love to influence. They’ll want to influence you – let them.

A couple of reminders:

1. In B2B markets, influencers are usually not customers or prospects. Which means that you can’t try to sell to them. Find out what they do want, then supply it.
2. You can’t rely on on-line channels to communicate with influencers. Research shows that, at best, 10% of communication is on-line, with the rest being telephone or face-to-face.