Whose opinion do you value?
Thursday, August 17th, 2006In Crossing the Chasm , Geoffrey Moore teaches us that a marketplace is made up of a group of consumers with similar needs who are self-referencing.
While most marketing practitioners have not been able to put Moore’s ’self-referencing’ framework into practice, the Internet has gone a long way in helping. Technology has allowed us to reduce the costs associated with measuring a person’s personal network and deriving the level of influence that individuals posess. These technological improvements have only made it easier for everyone to increase the reach and the velocity in which a person can reach into their network and request or share information about a product. Google, in particular, has done more to help users of similar interests and needs reference each other than any other tool available.
This access to information has driven the need for another mechanism which was not as critical previously: filtration systems. Ironically, the combination of referencing, reputation and filtration, a new information access paradigm was born. Users could proactively seek out Buzz products, determine the ratings based upon the crowd, and in some cases, their personal network, and receive recommendations through interactions with certain sites such as Amazon .
These tools have since enabled a plethora of individuals to transcend their previous activities and organize into smartMobs, get paid for their opinions, and garner bragging rights as amateurs. I’m particularly interested in the experiment taking place at BazaarVoice. Despite the presence of these examples within the consumer product sector, isn’t it strange that no one has any form of practical implementation of these tools and techniques with the context of the software industry?
