Web Feedback

I think the company should focus on the feedback/ customer review online that will be extremely valuable for a simple reason: opinions of customers are more influential than advertisements by the company. There is an important reason why customers’ opinions have so much more convincing power. Going inside the customer psychology or creating the persona types(as we have learned in class), I believe that the shoppers feel more secure to trust these opinions since they are the potential buyers of the product and these comments are left by the other customers. In other words, they share a “group” mentality in which shoppers look after each other by reading and commenting on the products. To them, the sales company is an outsider whose advertisement can be seen as biased and not thorough which is true in many cases and thus adding even more value to the customer opinions.
If company can quickly respond to the critical reviews, for example by fixing the problems of a product that are often mentioned on the rating websites, then it can create a bridge between the shoppers and the outsider(company). If the shoppers know that the company can back up the problems, then its product will gain more trust and the sells of this product will increase as a result. Furthermore, reacting to the criticism indicates two things; first, the company has an good customer service and second by fixing the problems, the commentators can now tell other potential buyers on the web that now there are no more shortcomings of the product.
To summarize my point about the dynamic and direct communication between the shoppers and the company (which is creating an experience), first I stated that customers' opinions have strong influence on potential buyers. To turn this into positive for marketing and sales, the company should create communication experience for customers by actively reading the reviewers opinions and try to respond as quickly as it can. The effect is that it will make company more trustworthy and less of an outsider in shoppers' eyes, as well as allows negative opinions to be corrected.
This can also help company gain insights since it will know clearly what the users like about the product and what do they not like about it. It is impossible to predict all the advantages and disadvantages of a particular product; therefore reading the reviews by common users give company a better idea on how to improve.
One type of social media that comes to my mind is Amazon; it has such a variety of items that even people who do not shop at the website go there to read the reviews. The reviews on this websites are really powerful (since Amazon is widely used and give readers a sense of objectivity and legitimacy) for they are read by so many people. I would recommend a company to read the reviews on widely used shopping site like Amazon, and try to build a communication with those who leave the comments.
Personally, I wanted to buy a Sony TV in Best Buy since it was on a special price that was cheaper than in Amazon. However I went to Amazon to read the reviews to see if this will be a good product or not. When I started to go down the reviews, I was initially inclined toward not buying it since many users complained about a auto-brightness adjusting feature of TV that made coloring of TV rather strange. But as I read more and more recent reviews, people were saying that the Sony have fixed this problem and the TV is an excellent item. This helped me make up my mind to buy the TV.
Often times what common people think is more important and powerful than opinions of experts since experts' reviews are excessive in amount and too technical in terms used. A lot more often, the shoppers simply want to know what is good about the product and what is bad about it.
I used the google blog to search Nike and I really liked it a lot. I felt these blogs just right in length, neither too long nor too short and I was able to go through a lot of them. Considerable amount of blogs did not look too organized on appearance but unlike the selling websites that has low quality design, I trusted more on what the bloggers said since I believe these reviews are objective. When I just typed in the word “Nike” most of blog at the beginning of the list was about the product on the list, which is nice since it will keep me updated and would let me know what is coming from the brand that I am interested.

I was not too sure how to exactly use the ZIietgest website. When I typed in Nike on each of the option links, I got statistical graphs and data. I assume this has to do with financial aspect of the company…? Not sure. But so far I like the google blog search better.