Mele’s Musings

The Power of Crowdsourcing Consumer Reviews

What do Angie’s List, Yelp, and ConsumerSearch have in common that can be applied to your crowdsourcing efforts?

blogs.sun.com

Article excerpt:  Customers are increasingly turning to each other, rather than a few experts, to gather information before making a purchase or signing a contract. The concept of crowdsourcing has worked well — mostly — for the field of knowledge management. How is it working for customer reviews? Consumers looking for information about services, products, restaurants or destinations once had to rely on expert reviewers, who would make their site visits, conduct their research, and eventually release their findings to the masses. With the growth of user-generated content, however, everyone is now an expert, or at least an expert consumer. And the opinions of this new class of reviewers are only a mouse click away.

the rest: technewsworld

Musing: Three things stand out to me from this article.  The first thing that makes crowdsourcing sites successful is integrity of the information.  Consumers have to believe in the source and the community in order for it to be useful to them.  That means brutal honesty as well as the ability to validate the sources – a blend of openness and fraud detection.  The second thing is making it easy and fun to share.  Contributing to a site should be easy, both in posting and responding.  The third thing is a mix of the consumer generated and the professionally generated.  I believe that consumers want both expert opinion and the real life experiences of people.  When getting both of those, they can be reasonably sure that the information is both broad and deep.