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In The Company of Strangers
By Cameron Ferroni | March 3, 2008
In case you’ve missed it, User Generated Reviews have become one of the defining moments of the Internet in the last year. I know this because they now have an acronym (UGR), and people are starting to talk about how they are becoming commoditized. Now, don’t get me wrong - I completely agree that having users participate in the dialog is a critical component to engagement and quality - however, I’m not yet ready to close the book on this chapter in the local evolution. I believe we still have a long way to go before we’ve truly maximized the potential, and nailed the customer experience.
I’ll admit, I’m naturally skeptical of user reviews. Frankly, why wouldn’t I be - I don’t know who the person writing it is, I don’t know what their tastes are, I don’t know if their definition of inexpensive is the same as mine, and I don’t know if they have ulterior motives - maybe they are a competitor to the business, or maybe they are an owner. “Well,” some may say, “that’s not much different than reading a restaurant critic in a local paper, so why do you care?” Well, it is different, at least on a couple of levels. First off, when it comes to the local restaurant critic, I have a history to look back on as a measuring stick. Once I’ve gone to 5-10 restaurants that they have reviewed, I can pretty easily tell if their tastes are the same as mine, and I can develop a calibration for what they mean by noisy, expensive, airy, etc. Secondly, for the most part professional reviewers are expected to maintain objectivity, to not be expressly involved in the businesses they are reviewing. Lastly, professional reviewers don’t have the ability to hide behind anonymity, which means they are held accountable in the public eye for what they have said.
So where am I going with this? I fundamentally believe that the most interesting reviews actually come from our friends. Whether online or off, it’s people whom you really know that matter the most. My wife reads many food blogs around the Seattle area - and she knows which of those authors she tends to agree with, and more often than not, when we try somewhere new it’s pretty inline with what our expectations were going in. Similarly we have any number of friends that we can rely on for reviews of everything from restaurants to plumbers. However, this dynamic still hasn’t truly evolved into online. Ninety percent of the time, if I’m looking for a new service - dr, dentist, plumber etc. - I don’t start online - I start with my friends and ask them for recommendations. Then I’ll often go online to see if the rest of the community corroborates the recommendation, or if there have been recent incidents that change the math. The UGRs play a part - no doubt about it - but they are just part of the overall decision process.
Some sites are doing a good job of this already. All of the social network sites are trying to build more community and focus on what your friends are doing, with varying degrees of success when it comes to businesses. And some of the better local sites - mostly niche - are trying to do this as well. But we’ve yet to crack the code on having a critical mass of this functionality across all business types, in all areas, and across the web. And until we do, I’m not ready to call UGR done - at least not yet.
Topics: Neighborhood, Community, Local Search, Content |
March 4th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Great observation, Cameron. Some elements of social networking have become so synonymous with broadcasting one’s views to the world, that it’s easy to forget the value of semi-closed networks. When you call around to half a dozen friends looking for a plumber, you’re essentially tapping into a closed network, and the web has the ability to facilitate that just as much as it can facilitate the wisdom of crowds.
Building a critical mass in this respect should be no different in principle from building a critical mass of strangers’ reviews, with one important difference. In considering strangers’ reviews, it’s important to have many examples to weigh, in the hope of discerning a reliable trend. With friends’ reviews, however, a single review can be enough if it’s the right friend. So, yes, scale is important for friends’ reviews, in order to cover multiple categories and geographies, but the scale doesn’t have to be as large as it might seem.
To put it another way, strangers’ reviews require critical breadth and depth, whereas friends’ reviews really only require critical breadth.