Nowadays the social media sites are promoting the idea of "wisdom of crowd" concept. When you have 500 people reviewing a hotel in Trip Advisor or a book in Amazon, then I know the average scores of hotel/book etc. are highly valuable.
The public rating of anything is often more comprehensive than marketer's own case study - as the later is carefully filtered through their business strategy.
So why are we not seeing more B2B reviews then?
There are quite a few issues here. First of all, many businesses have often a monopoly on their service/products. If you read a bad review of their service, you may not have a choice to select another one as no other business may offer the service at your budget.
Also, there are lots of legal implications. As a business consumer, you may have your rights defined by NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) and protocols, which are quite difficult to break.
Moreover, people tend to grunt more about bad service rather than praising a good service. So, there are usually hundreds of satisfied customers against a negative customer. This often skews the review rating. Unlike B2C reviews, B2B reviews don't tend to balance our negative reviews due to their sheer narrow market size (in most cases).
This can also affect trustworthiness of the review. A good review may be posted by someone from concerned business's marketing department and the negative one may be the brain child of a nasty competitor's.
That's the place where B2C reviews have upper hand - since there are so many consumers who write reviews, the average effect always cancels out the unusual high or low ratings. With more and more reviews, the score tend to reflect true feature of the product/service.
Here is a good article on this very topic.
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=698&doc_id=171802
The public rating of anything is often more comprehensive than marketer's own case study - as the later is carefully filtered through their business strategy.
So why are we not seeing more B2B reviews then?
There are quite a few issues here. First of all, many businesses have often a monopoly on their service/products. If you read a bad review of their service, you may not have a choice to select another one as no other business may offer the service at your budget.
Also, there are lots of legal implications. As a business consumer, you may have your rights defined by NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) and protocols, which are quite difficult to break.
Moreover, people tend to grunt more about bad service rather than praising a good service. So, there are usually hundreds of satisfied customers against a negative customer. This often skews the review rating. Unlike B2C reviews, B2B reviews don't tend to balance our negative reviews due to their sheer narrow market size (in most cases).
This can also affect trustworthiness of the review. A good review may be posted by someone from concerned business's marketing department and the negative one may be the brain child of a nasty competitor's.
That's the place where B2C reviews have upper hand - since there are so many consumers who write reviews, the average effect always cancels out the unusual high or low ratings. With more and more reviews, the score tend to reflect true feature of the product/service.
Here is a good article on this very topic.
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=698&doc_id=171802
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