The world of advertising is trembling. As the following graph from Nielsen, a market research giant, online conversations and the opinions of other internet users have much more credibility than newspaper articles and any other form of advertisement!
What can we take from this? The power is to the organizations that leverage the user’s opinions on the products by providing the right platform: this relaunched Amazon at the beginning of the 2000’s, and is the fundamental insight of TripAdvisor and many others. It’s a real crowd-sourcing of opinions that people use more and more to decide whether to use/buy the product.
Is it resilient to manipulation? It is certainly more than conventional advertisement. And the most important is to determine how the seller reacts to these opinions and improves his product.
Crowd-opinion is the new credo of trust, like crowd-knowledge is the new baseline of knowledge. It has limits, it can be sometimes dangerous but in a world where we often buy remote products that none of our friends has seen or used, it seems like the best alternative.
What do you think? How much do you rely on crowd-opinions?
