Showing posts with label web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web. Show all posts

20 Jan 2010

Why not much B2B review yet?

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

9 Jul 2009

How Google makes money?

I know, you will jump and say from advertisement, isn't it.
Yes, they make most of their revenue from advertisement - nothing special about it. But the question is how do they do it. Is it all fair for rest of us i.e. netizens?
You are already aware that when you search anything in Google, a colored horizontal and vertical (on right) column are displayed which says sponsored links. Obviously Google does take money from those companies for displaying their ads in web result. But users are clever and they rarely click on those links. Just ask yourself, how often do you click on those links?
But people, although the number is very small - approximately 1 click on such ads for every 1000 page visits! However, Google pages are accessed by millions (if not billions) of visitors every day. So, for Google, even 0.1% such clicks do bring huge amount of revenue. But sometimes Google does behave unethically. You can be a member of Google's adsense and put ads on your own blog (like this) and Google promises to send you money when user clicks ads on your page. But the catch is, you won't get payment until your account accumulates $100. For a small website, it will take years to reach that stage. So, all these years, Google will get revenue from advertisers but won't pay you anything for displaying them in your page. No worries, after you reach $100, you'll get the money - isn't it? Well, here lies the ugly bit. Google can (and they do) terminate your adsense account at any time if they think clicks are not legitimate. Still it seems reasonable, as you are not supposed to click on your own ads (i.e. they can track from which IP ads were clicked etc.) But even then, Google can terminate your account at anytime without giving you a reason at all. Well, they do - they did it with me. Then I searched on the net whether other people have similar experience and yes, they have done it with millions of people! They claim they would return money to advertisers but how do you know they have done it in practice?
Not very nice, is it?
The story does not end here. Every time you search anything or use Gmail, or Google Toolbar etc., Google stores information of your activity. There is no time limit how long Google will store that information. They can store it forever. Then they sell these information to 3rd parties for market analysis (does the word Google Analytics ring bell?).
Google bots scan your emails (if bots can do it, any one in Google office can do as well), it displays some ads on your inbox title bar based on what you typed in your email. Google's Chrome collects all bits of your web browsing info (that's why I don't use it but I still use Gmail though).
Google never discloses what algorithm it uses to check invalid clicks adsense account, how to rank websites, how it uses user net surfing info etc. In a nutshell, Google is never responsible to anyone for its activity.
Are you now afraid of searching anything using Google?
I am sure you will now ask me if I am recommending not to use Google at all. Well, it's your choice really. All I suggest that you don't put all your eggs in one basket. Always use some alternative emails, alternative search engines etc. That's it.

29 Jun 2009

How online feedback affecting business

How do you search for a product? The product may be your next car, enterprise database in your organization or finding best re-mortgage rate. Chances are (well, I'm pretty confident) that you search for best deals on internet.
You are most likely to scan three types of sites - viz
1. Each vendors' own website

2. A comparison site (often known as screen-scrappers like money supermarket, froogle etc.)
3. The feedback written by general public (either online or anecdotes from your friends, colleagues etc.)
In pre-internet era (say before 2000 when internet was still few and far between), online feedback sites were rare and so was comparion sites. So, consumers could only gather information from respective company's websites and whatever they claimed in traditional TV, radio or newspaper ads.
The obvious problem was to validate their claims. If they said "according to XYZ survey conducted..." you really not have much scope of validating this claim. You don't really have enough time/resource to find out the research report from library journals.
But now, thanks to online forums, companies don't have space to hide. The best example, is to select a car. Almost all manufacturers have user forums on internet. Before you actually test drive a car, you have access to all the things that went wrong with particular model. So what? Does it prevent anyone buying a lemon or selecting wrong mortgage?

No - of course it does not completely eliminate bad selection, but no doubt it makes consumer a lot more wiser and apprehensive of what to look for.

Companies often claim that for every bad review, there are hundreds of satisfied customers. Yes, it is quite true on some extent. Often consumers won't praise a product often as they criticise it when things to wrong. So, no review of a product can have two meaning - either everyone using it was very satisfied or it sold so few that even those with bad experience, didn't bother writing their feedback online.
What is interesting is that, even today, many big companies are not really taking online feedback seriously. A well known case was "Dell Hell" (search for it on internet). Basically few years back Dell started selling crap laptops and people flooded the web with poor consumer experience. That seriously did a dent on Dell's revenue. Finally companied take steps to raise their quality and pacify the online rants of users.
Now the question which begs an answer is that why companies are still ignoring online citicism from users? It depends. If the company's primary user base is old people - who are not net savvy, they know they won't hit hard as mainly younger generations are glued to net. Many people, often confuse anectodal evidence (ie. my friends car worked fine for 10 years) with statistical evidence (eg. 500 models of same car had a serious breakdown in first year).
There are some agencies, who actually work professionally to improve online reputation of many companies! So, if company A sees that complaints about their product is flooding the net, then they ask for these specialists to counteract the issue. These firms then try to dilute negative feedback with loads of artificial positive reviews. They even employ tactics so that search engines brings up good feedbacks first.
It's a cat and mouse game.