Trust in your fellow consumer.
In the past couple of months I have been asking friends and family for suggestions on purchasing my first smartphone for personal use. “Well, I have the BlackBerry Curve, which I love. Definitely don’t get the iPhone, you can’t instant message or use it abroad,” one co-worker advised. “No, no, no, the Blackberry Curve erases all your text messages and the speaker quality is terrible for music,” my father countered. Even my hairdresser offered advice: “Palm Pre’s the way to go. It’s the best for browsing the web.”
Well, I am not planning on traveling to Europe soon, I have no interest in instant messaging or blasting music from my phone and browsing the web from a two inch screen makes me dizzy- that’s just me. So, here I am back at square one with a laundry list of contradicting recommendations from unqualified sources.
A recent Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey indicates that consumers trust recommendations from “known people” first and foremost. Well, that’s true. Anywhere from Doctor Referrals to counsel on the best Local Italian restaurant, your list of “known people” is your first source. But is it always the best? Asking a handful of family and friends for tips and suggestions might get you the most biased answers of all, each based off of single experiences with relatively little or no expertise. Although something has to be said for “in-the-trenches” consumer opinions, where do we go when we’re looking for knowledgeable, firsthand, impartial, targeted answers? When advice from your boldly opinionated friends and family leave with even more questions than with which you started, where do you turn?
As The Nielsen study shows, when we look for answers outside our personal networks, we put trust in faceless consumers on the web. What is notable about the 70% of respondents trusting online consumer posts is the other sources that the percentage beats out. Over formal advertising, a multibillion dollar industry, we put our trust in the words of complete strangers. With consumer opinions posted online as the number two source of trusted advertising, it’s clear that the power of social media continues to grow and the term “word of mouth” is no longer to be taken literally.
The online consumer dialogue consists of industry experts and newcomers alike, giving us the ability to either immerse ourselves in a larger industry-wide conversation or pickup quick, simple answers. Sifting through blog posts and various responses, pros and cons, multiple experiences etc. force us to become more informed consumers. The ability to seek out fellow consumers who are also considered “experts” on any desired topic, is also what makes social media an extremely powerful tool in terms of consumer decision making.
No offense to Dad or the folks over at Heavenly Hair, but I’m taking my smartphone questions to the web. I’ll consult the consumer experts, get involved in the online dialogue and make an informed confident decision about the device that’s right for me.
Now if only I could find a smartphone smart enough to make that decision for me…