I'm seeing more and more businesses pop up that are designed to capitalize on the time-honored fact that people rely more on recommendations from others than on advertising and marketing when making purchase decisions.
The latest is MarketplaceStories.com, a social media website where shoppers can make connections with each other, share opinions and recommendations, and help each other research products and services. It looks like you can get a very basic level of access with a free membership or a more robust set of features and benefits for a paid premium membership.
It seems they have set it up so that it will be hard for companies to game the system, which is always my first concern when it comes to formalized word-of-mouth systems (like Amazon reviews, for example, which are littered with suspicious product reviews that really seem like they were written by the manufacturer or author). But I will be curious to see if people are willing to pay for word-of-mouth advice, which theoretically is available for free all over the internet.
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