The Daily Dose

About 18 months ago I wrote a short paper predicting how the rise of blogging and online communities would impact on the way advertising agencies managed brands. I think much of what I had to say at the time fell on death ears, that was until last week when the BBC ran an article on the same subject as a news item on their site.

The fact is that these online communities now exert tremendous influence on peoples purchasing patterns. Here’s recent personal example which will hopefully illustrate my point.

I wanted to purchase a DVD Recorder and being the sad techno freak I am I visted a number of web sites and studied the form until I had made up my mind which one to go for. My last step was to see if there were any reviews published, as a result of that search I came across AVFORUMS where there are literally thousands of post from individuals who have plenty to say about there experiences, good and bad, on all number of related products. I quickly looked up the make and model I was thinking of buying and after reading through the reviews I quickly learn’t that there were some real drawbacks with that model and as a result went onto follow the reccomendations of other forum members and purchased another brand.

The fact of the matter is that reccomendations are still the best testimonial to your product or service and as a result ‘Word of Mouth’ marketing is the new buzz word. The problem companies face now is that since the arrival of Blogs and online forums whilst good news spreads fast bad news travels even faster.