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…

Improving the influence of your blog...?

You may have detected from previous posts here, here and here that I'm doubtful of the influence of blogs. There are influential blogs, for sure, but finding them amongst the mountain of drivel is hard. And blog links are a crude and inaccurate mechanism for determining influence.

So I'm intrigued to see the emergence of a comment rating utility, SezWho. Basically, it's the same facility that allows readers to score the usefulness of a review on Amazon. "Was this review helpful to you, Yes or No?" In the same way, blog readers will be able to rae comments - "Was this comment helpful to you, Yes or No?" In that way, readers will be able to see who posts the most valuable comments.

I also think that commenters will think twice about what they say before commenting, thus improving the overall standard of comments. And thus the usefulness, and therefore the influence, of the blog should increase (all other things being equal).

Evolving social media

I'm getting into the evolution of social media and its influence, driven partly by research for the book, and partly through trying to understand what (if any) social media I should be using to engage Influencer50's market.

Following on from emerging measurement criteria, Eric Kintz points us to Peter Kim at Forrester, who has suggested a model of personas that we adopt when using various social media. I don't think the model s complete or static but it's a good start to understanding how folk use social media, now and in the future.

What's interesting is that much of the debate seems to exist in a post-LinkedIn world. Am I right in sensing that the social media gurus see LinkedIn as passe? Is FaceBook its successor?

It's always refreshing to talk to "real" people doing what I'd call proper jobs. Selling stuff, making stuff, marketing stuff*, etc. They use LinkedIn all the time, and will continue to use it because of the investment they put into it. They are not nearly as fashion-conscious when it comes to social media as social media commentators are. As always, the "gurus" have to show the way, but the majority is just fine with the status quo.


*Disclaimer: describing marketing as a proper job is highly subjective. Read this to see whether your marketing career qualifies as "proper" (registration required).

Measuring the influence of social media users

You may have detected from this blog that I’m less than convinced by the hype over Web 2.o and it’s impact on influence. Certainly, from our research work for clients, blogs rarely feature as a key influencer.

Part of my problem is that the degree of influence is asserted, measured by the number of links or some other dubious metric. So I’m intrigued by an emerging method of determining the influence of blogs and other social media such as FaceBook and LinkedIn. Hat tip to James Governor who linked to David Brain’s sixtysecondview blog. David runs Edelman PR in the UK, but otherwise seems a good chap…

David’s idea is to measure not only the links that one gets on a blog, but also the links on LinkedIn, friends in FaceBook, Twitter friends, Flickr photo uploads, Diggs and other social media activities. The concept is premised on the trend for people to have more than one social tool in use. Sheesh – I can barely keep up with blogging.

I can’t help thinking that for all its diligence in tracking the various media it’s still measuring links, and links don’t necessarily imply influence. My beef with the links=influence assertion is that it’s easy to fake links, and that links are only a measure of one dimension of influence – connectedness. There are other dimensions, such as expertise, that are much harder to measure. And what about the value of particular connections? Connections are not equal – I know who matters more to me in my LinkedIn network.

But David’s composite score does help because it evens out some of the biases that would be present in just one social tool. By measuring half a dozen or so, an average score emerges.

What I find worrying is that in order to demonstrate and exert influence through social media one has to use multiple formats. I could spend all my time doing just that, but I have a proper job as well. Those that have time to keep up with the social media demands of influence run the risk of ignoring the other dimensions of influence. Plus the most important risk of all, which is forgetting who, why and how they are trying to influence in the first place.

Today’s state-of-the-art influence modus operanda is one-to-one communication, by meeting people face-to-face, telephone conversations and email. In that order. Social media is a distant fourth at the moment.

Three myths of influence

Infoweek has a well-balanced article on the impact of social media on influence. I suggest you read it. While I don’t disagree with the analysis, the article highlights three key misunderstandings about the nature of influence.

The first is that influence on social media is somehow different to influence in the real world. Everybody these days seems to have a Web 2.0 centric view of the world. The hype reminds me of the “New Economy” – and we all know what happened to that. Social media is being overstated, and the influence of those participating in it is also overstated. Remember that only 6% of communication occurs on line – the lion’s share of interaction remains staunchly in the real world with face-to-face conversations.

The second misunderstanding in the article relates to the disappointing results of influencer outreach programmes. All of the activities discussed in the article targeted consumer influencers. But in fact the most important influencers in consumer markets are not consumers – they are retailers and distributors, consultants and professional advisers, lawyers and doctors. You can target these people, because they are easily identified, and you can measure their impact (if you’ve given them some tools of influence).

The final issue with the article is the assumption that links are equal to influence: the more link the greater the influence. Wrong. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point identified three types of influencer (connectors, mavens and salesmen) – why does everyone want to be (or target) connectors? Connectors are necessary but not sufficient to influencer prospects. Only 3% of people are true connectors – the rest are link gatherers. In fact, we see that salesmen (persuaders) are the most effective influencers on decision makers.

There are several other myths of influence which I’ll be addressing in coming weeks. Unless these myths are challenged they will choke the notion that influencers can be identified and reached.