I just finished reading Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. It’s quite a hot book around the office here. No surprise given our unique selling point is being able to tag products as part of the review process.
Basically the author argues that tagging will be the new way of organizing information. No more categories. While I agree with his basic idea, I’m not willing to write off the idea of categories just yet. Why not? Well, here’s a telling quote from Amazon:
“Finally, he shows how by “going miscellaneous,” anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.” (italics added by me)
The author posits that the power now lies in with the masses in that they decide how information is organized and they decide what information is important to them. However, I immediately thought of the deluge of information and the time necessary to find and parse all of it. While I enjoy exploring the internet, I readily admit this kind of activity takes a lot of time. Most of the time I don’t have the luxury to take all the raw data and organize it in a way that’s meaningful for me. I want information and I want it fast. I don’t have time to read 20 news articles and decide what’s most important. I like having The New York Times decide what’s the most important news story for me by putting it on the front page.
What are your thoughts on this book/theory?
Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip wrote a great post today highlighting our success metrics which helped us win the Innovative Publisher of the Year Award.
Take a read to see some interesting stats about our best performing affiliate partners including OneStepAhead, BiggerBras, REI, and Overstock (in that order), our conversion rate, and our performance rank in affiliate networks.
There’s a lot of great buzz around consumer reviews lately, as more market researchers and retailers see the benefits of giving customers a public voice. I had a great exchange of ideas recently with Paul M. Banas who writes a top content marketing blog Insight Buzz on the topics of consumer reviews and social elements of online retail.
There have been many studies done on the influence of consumer reviews, such as the Deloitte stats Paul pointed out: “we find the 82% of online shoppers who read reviews say reviews have a direct influence on what they buy, either changing their minds on which product to buy or to provide reassurance on purchasing their original choice.”
This leads into what kind of consumer reviews people trust and why. Jeremiah Owyang delves into this in his post citing a study that shows people trust the opinions of their friends or acquaintances who have used the products themselves most, and the opinions by bloggers least:
So when it comes to consumer reviews, it’s interesting that people trust consumer reviews on a retailer’s site (60%) more than consumer reviews on a content site (52%). Buzzillions is in an interesting mix between the two, since we aggregate consumer reviews from all of our retail clients, yet we are considered a consumer reviews site.
The stats show that consumer generated reviews overall are trusted a lot more than editorial/expert reviews, discussion boards, and especially reviews by bloggers, and Jeremiah emphasizes the need for product manufacturers and marketers to recognize this as a big priority.
