User generated content: reviewing the reviewers
ZDNet’s Dan Farber signals that “Sun CEO and chief blogger Jonathan Schwartz is taking the social media route to help market Sun's array of products to customers,” in the BTL post “Schwartz increases sunlight on sun.com.”
At Sun’s blog, Schwartz says of his company’s strategy:
you'll see something very interesting next week start to appear on Sun's web pages and throughout our on-line store. You'll start to see product reviews written by users. You'll see user defined ratings, right on our products. Just like book or product reviews at Amazon
Farber muses on the strategy:
What will be interesting is to see how Sun handles the trolls, who will certainly flame away on sun.com. Schwartz says that customers will trust the opinions of the users more Sun's spiel, and he's right–as long as their is transparency among users, such as using their real names, and that they actually have first-hand knowledge of the products.
The scholarly work, “Six degrees of reputation: The use and abuse of online review and recommendation systems,” analyzes user review activity at Amazon.com and discusses how “Users will adapt ... no doubt try and find new ways to game the system.” Shay David and Trevor Pinch describe their work:
This paper reports initial findings from a study that used quantitative and qualitative research methods and custom–built software to investigate online economies of reputation and user practices in online product reviews at several leading e–commerce sites (primarily Amazon.com). We explore several cases in which book and CD reviews were copied whole or in part from one item to another and show that hundreds of product reviews on Amazon.com might be copies of one another. We further explain the strategies involved in these suspect product reviews, and the ways in which the collapse of the barriers between authors and readers affect the ways in which these information goods are being produced and exchanged. We report on techniques that are employed by authors, artists, editors, and readers to ensure they promote their agendas while they build their identities as experts. We suggest a framework for discussing the changes of the categories of authorship, creativity, expertise, and reputation that are being re–negotiated in this multi–tier reputation economy.
For more discussion on user-generated content and the social Web see my “How many Internet users are generating content online?”
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