The concept that intrigued me the most from the two articles was the idea of trust and how it is used to shape the marketability of the product. In these two articles, the products are books and eBay.
The Six Degrees article discussed the types of influence that online book reviews give to the readers. I actually don't really read book reviews online - I usually only read books that are recommended by my friends or that are on the Times bestseller list. After reading these articles, I guess I do this because I trust these reviewers who have proven themselves to be accurate in the past, and I don't trust the online reviewers who I don't know. But perhaps other people do listen to these reviews - the article discussed how some publishers actually pay critics to write reviews of their books for others to read, and how plagurism is also a problem on some websites, which I didn't really think about. It would be interesting to see if these positive or negative reviews actually affected the sale of the book, or if the book was truly good or bad...
I found the eBay article interesting as well, in that the entire "community" is built on trust and reviews alone. I had never actually heard of the 5 basic values of eBay and I wonder if those values really do affect the trust that seems to have been built around the community. I find it interesting that for the most part, users are quite legitimate and I think that the reviews in this situation play a huge factor on whether or not a user decides to purchase a certain product. Since the entire situation takes place online where you just "meet" people online, you have to have some basis of standards in order to feel that that sense of trust exists, and that's why these reviews are essential.
4 comments:
The knob came of as I unpackaged the item. Anyways, it's strange how reputation will play with person's conscience. Websites like craigslist has fraud warnings instead of reputation system and the price of things that come on craigslist and ebay have a big gap. Ebay items seem to be more expensive. However, people are willing to put up with that because of the trust issues. So it all boils down to 'more trust, more prolific'.
"It would be interesting to see if these positive or negative reviews actually affected the sale of the book, or if the book was truly good or bad.."
Yes. I think this is a great question.
I go to Baidu's Q&As quite often. There is lots of copied and nonsense answers to every question. However, it's very easy to identify which is useful and meaningful. It should be the same as the online book review. The users may have the abilities to identify which review is a really valuable one.
Hi Kristina,
A bit off topic... Since you are interested in Viral Marketing, I thought you will be interested in www.Brickfish.com
Here is brief description of what they are doing.
"Brands and agencies use our platform to launch online advertising and marketing campaigns that spark the creation of brandfocused UGC, such as blogs, images, video and audio. This content is shared from consumer to consumer via email, IM, and social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube. Campaign participants are rewarded for creating, voting, reviewing and sharing content. The Brickfish platform then tracks consumer interactions with this content and provides detailed analytics on campaign reach, performance and demographics."
I was looking at it as a social networking tool and then realized that it was actually created as a marketing tool.
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