Image by inju via FlickrThe Seattle PI is running an article on the adoption and use of user generated reviews at Amazon.com and other stores. User reviews are a form of social media that has been around for a while (Amazon started in 2003) but is still little understood in the influence they will have on a users shopping habits. What was interesting was some of the data points that came out of the article.

A four star rated product sells better than a five star rated product. No product is perfect, and some products will never make everyone happy. There will always be the odd person out in the reviewing cycle that will hate it. However, what is being learned is that this gives an air of legitimacy to the product. It makes it a more honest product in the longer run because the reviews are mixed. I know when I got my first negative review for my first book; I almost breathed a sigh of relief, because many people had given it a five star rating. While it is not a best seller, it is a steady seller right now, and people are entitled to their viewpoint, if anything that negative one star review helped me more with my first book than anything else I could have done.

User reviews in many ways are just as important as blogging, tweeting, or participating in Facebook. When your friends recommend a product, or write a review and are willing to talk about the product you will listen to them first. Social networking and word of mouth marketing is important when it comes to friends recommending products to friends. When Boom and Bust in the Blogosphere comes out, I will be talking about the book on line across many social networking sources, including Facebook. It is the user reviews that will help make the book legitimate. In many ways, those user reviews when they are noticed will determine if someone buys the book.

“The user-generated content, whether written or video or otherwise, has become more and more dispersed and more and more available and it has started to prove to be quite valuable,” Lonczak said. “Shoppers are looking for, ‘What is real, what can I believe? I can’t touch the product or feel it or smell it, how can I be sure what is right for me?’ ” Source: Seattle PI

User generated content in relationship to products is more of a bottom up process. It is users talking to users rather than marketing talking to everyone with the same message. Users will use speech and grammar that makes sense to their market segments. No one would ask me to write a customer review in Chinese or French, but they might in English. It is these touch points, how did others feel about the product that is helping sell the products.

Traditional marketing still has its place, but as user generated reviews and content becomes more important to the sales process, understanding the users of the product becomes more important. No marketing budget has the money to pay for user reviews of products, the average discount book review can run between 75 to 400 dollars per review depending on where you go. The average book review on Amazon by a person who probably read the book was free, and that free review will generate more sales because it is more honest in its viewpoint. The marketing machine can say nearly anything, but what really counts is the user generated content that when you notice it, will influence sales of that product.

Tags: social networking, sales, product, endorsement, book review, people