Here at Netemic, we spend a lot of time tracking both blogs and consumer review sites for clients. Our experience for the UK market is that broadly speaking, whilst tracking blogs is important (and in our opinion will become increasingly so), it is presently consumer review sites that hold the bulk of interesting and relevant information for corporates that wish to know what their customers are saying.
We think that this represents an interesting development: while blogs have attracted most attention as the poster-child of the new wave ‘interactive web’ (aka ‘Web 2.0′), relatively few people are blogging regularly in the UK compared to the US market. Those that are tend to either be pretty efficient and are giving considered opinions on matters or products of importance to them or are individuals commenting on purchase, product and support experiences as part of their ongoing personal weblog entries that are not generally focused on such matters.
We think that both are of relevance and importance to corporations. However, alongside this, we are seeing more and more individuals who perhaps are not ready or do not wish to post on blogs but who are prepared for the first time to give their opinions of purchasing and owning products and services that matter to them. Consumer forums and message boards provide a platform for web users who do not wish to set up a blog, but who do want to voice an opinion online, particularly where motivated by issues with a specific product or service. The growing number of sites that allow users to contribute content is helping to foster a general online atmosphere where non-specialist users are willing or even expect to be able to articulate their opinions to an audience of their peers.
A recent in depth study from the US carried out on behalf of Yahoo and OMD, “Yahoo! and OMD Study Reveals Online Research Plays Critical Role in Consumers’ Offline Purchases; Online Price Comparisons and ”Communal Shopping” Create Trust and Drive Decision Making” provides strong evidence for the growing influence of customer forums in the US market and we believe we are seeing the same trend in the UK. This study points out that a majority of consumers now turn to the internet to research making purchases whether they intend to buy online or not. Increasingly, as well as researching the sites of the selling organization, they are also turning to the comments of other consumers to seek advice with customer forums highly prevalent.
We are increasingly including customer forums in our tracking of consumer comment as well as monitoring blogs — both specialist and the long tail.
