Digital Minds Forum

In Strangers We Trust…

Written by Neil Kelley on Tuesday 29th June 2010 at 12:06 pm

Ok, here’s a stat for you to ponder – “25% of search results for the world’s Top 20 brands link to user generated content”. (Aaron, C., Edwards, E. and Lanier, X., 2009. Turning Blogs and User-Generated Content into Search Engine Results SES, pp.24-25)

Hmmm… so, if you were to search for Coca Cola or Disney or GE then approximately 25% of the results delivered by your Search Engine would be links to content generated by their customers. So, for organisations out there, you better hope they’re saying something nice!

User Generated Content (UGC) , as with a lot of terminology associated with Digital Marketing, has a numbers of different aliases. You may have come across Consumer Generated Media, eWOM, Earned Media or Participatory Media… essentially they all refer to the same thing – content on the internet produced by someone who is not affiliated with the organisation or brand itself.

OK, I’m not so naïve to think that organisations don’t try to produce digital content that looks like it has been written by an independent, objective consumer – consider how Dialaflight were ‘attacked’ by an alleged independent blogger last year or how Sony created a cringeworthy piece of UGC to influence those in the build up to the launch of their PSP. They’ve turned ‘blogging’ (Web Logging) into ‘flogging’ (Fake Web Logging).

Degree of Trust in Adverts April 2009

In April 2009 research by Nielsen demonstrated that after the traditional form of Word of Mouth (recommendations from people you know) the second most trusted form of ‘advertising’ was “Consumer Opinions Posted Online” with 70% of people indicated they had a degree of trust in this form of communication.

70% of people who access consumer opinions online trust them and 86% of online consumers use online reviews and UGC prior to making purchasing decisions (PR Newswire, Dec.9 2008. Kudxu.com Survey Reveals Online Reviews Significantly Impact Consumer Spending retrieved March 12 2009 from Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe Database).

So, all this means that consumers who shop online trust the content, feedback and reviews of strangers rather than the organisation and/or brand in question. As Google’s search algorithm, Caffeine, changes the way that web content is searched and delivered to consumers then more and more UGC will be found, read and used during the ‘Information Search’ and ‘Evaluation of Alternatives’ of consumer buyer behaviour.

Tags: behaviour, consumer, content, Marketing, user, web

Comments (2)

Category: Advertising, Emerging Trends, Marketing

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Interesting post indeed.
It does seem that in today’s uncertain marketplace, the most influential factor when buying something is often our friends’ or other buyer’s opinion.
Most online customers now trust other customers’ feedback more than they do the strap line and this is because human nature dictates that we trust people when they are ‘on our side’ … the old ‘us and them’ attitude.. even if we do not know the person giving the feedback. From the buyer’s perspective the person giving the feedback has no real interest to say anything but the truth.

Completely agree with your comments, and it’s a shame there’s still this ‘us and them’ culture and feeling… but don’t feel that will ever disappear! From industry experience (video games) the loyalty to a console platform is incredibly strong, the consumers here are labelled ‘fanboys, and this is one area of UGC where I definitely wouldn’t trust them to offer the ‘truth’, but know that it does have massive influence on buyer behaviour…

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