Do you need to be a gift for a new or expectant mother in your life, but all this baby stuff has you stumped? No prob, Bob. We’ve got everything you need to pick the the perfect present right here.
Baby Bottles
Bottle Warmers
Cribs
Baby Monitors
Strollers
Baby Swings
Car Seats
Cradles
77% of online shoppers use user reviews and ratings while making purchases online. This means that companies increasingly rely on positive online user reviews to make money.
Enter, astroturfing.
“Astroturfing” is a play on the idea of a grassroots movement. In this case, instead of people supporting a business from the grassroots through genuine online reviews and recommendations to friends, businesses are paying to have these positive reviews written for them, giving them the false appearance of having a grassroots fan base. As people increasingly turn to online user reviews to help them make decisions about everything from what to buy to where to vacation, companies have come to rely more and more on positive reviews for their business. This pressure has caused many companies to engage in astroturfing in order to keep up with the competition.
A recent exposé in the New York Times by David Streightfeld shows how astroturfing is being used on major websites like Amazon, Yelp!, and TripAdvisor. Streightfeld cites Craigslist posts in which users solicit positive reviews with posts like “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor,” and “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.” Streightfeld also interviewed freelance writers some of whom are making up to $10 per review writing reviews on sites like Amazon.
We even run into this problem with fake user reviews on Pikimal from time to time. For instance, take a look at this glowing review of one of the vodkas in our Vodkas Piki.
This vodka sounds pretty amazing, right? That is until you find out that this particular review was posted on the same day that we were contacted by a PR firm representing that brand of vodka and the review was posted using the same email address as the one the PR firm used to contact us. That sort of transparent astroturfing may seem brazen – or even downright sloppy – but this is hardly an isolated incident. Fishy user reviews like this one appear on our site all the time. Some are easy to catch, some are a little more tricky, and undoubtedly some manage to escape detection.
The problem that we, and so many other websites face, is what to do about astroturfing. Some companies use human review to try to get rid of fake reviews. Unfortunately, this system can only realistically eliminate the most obvious offenders, and on sites like Amazon with millions of of user reviews, having a person review each one is impractical. Computer algorithms are sometimes used to do some of the sorting work, but even these are not absolute answers.
For consumers, a better answer might be to refer only to reviews and recommendations from friends and people you know. The website Stamped.com is a great example of a way to do this. Stamped allows users to share their favorite books, restaurants, music, movies and more directly with the people in their social networks. By dealing only with the recommendations of people you know, you can at least be somewhat more certain that the recommendations you are getting are genuine. Unfortunately, you don’t always agree with your friends, and if you are trying to make a decision about something that none of them have tried before, you are left flying blind.
So what other options do consumers have?
I started Pikimal to help address some of the issues that cause people to turn to user reviews to make decisions in the first place. As we’ve seen in Part 1 and Part 2 of this discussion on user reviews, the system of user ratings utilized by most major websites is extremely flawed – maybe even irreparably so. But why do people turn to user reviews in the first place?
I think for most of us, user reviews are a way of having more confidence in our purchases. Especially when we are buying something with which we may not have much experience, looking to the experiences and knowledge of others seems like a much better option than making a decision based on marketing or random choice. The problem is that by relying on user reviews, consumers can get the feeling that they are making better decisions without having actually made a better decision at all.
But what else can people do? For someone to actually make a truly good decision they would need to be able to have all of the relevant information and would need to be able to process it in a way that made certain that they were making the best choice for their unique needs and circumstances. No one has the time or the capacity to become an expert on every product that they purchase, so user reviews seem like the best alternative.
The really cool thing about Pikimal, however, is that we’ve built a tool – the Piki – that takes all the facts about a set of products and uses an individually customizable algorithm to allow consumers to find the right products for them. There’s no need to be an expert on something to know that you are making the best decision. You just tell the Piki what is important to you, and using the facts available for each product, the Piki tells you which is the best for you. Users can include reviews and ratings in their decision if they like, or if they’d rather just go with the facts, they have the option of eliminating them altogether.
Pretty cool, huh? We think so.
Christmas shopping for the men in your life can be tricky. That’s why we thought we’d put together a list of gift ideas for all the different men in your life. If you need a little extra help shopping, just follow the links to the Pikis. There you’ll find a top ten list based on the facts about each product to help you take the guess work out of your holiday shopping.
Best Gifts for Geeky Guys
Computer Monitors
Ebook Readers
Electronic Translators
Satellite Radio Receivers
Tablet Computers
Best Gifts for Sporty Guys
Baseball Cleats
Baseball Gloves
Baseball Equipment Bags
Climbing Harnesses
Ski Boots
Ski Goggles
Best Gifts for Outdoorsy Guys
Binoculars
Compasses
Crossbows
Hydration Backpacks
Kayaks
Rifles and Shotguns
Spotting Scopes
Telescopes
Tents
Night Vision Devices
Rooftop Cargo Carriers
Best Gifts for Foodie Guys
Blenders
Bread Machine
Coffee Grinder
Deep Fryer
Food Processors
Meat Slicers and Grinders
Waffle Makers
Best Gifts for Hipster Guys
Bike Computers
Bike Lights
Camcorders
Camera Lenses
DSLR Cameras
Turntables
Typewriters
Best Gifts for Handy Guys
Chainsaws
Electric Drills
Lawnmowers
Portable Air Compressors
Pressure Washers
Snow Blowers
Best Gifts for The Man Cave
Beer
Blu-Ray Players
DVD Players
Kegerators
Televisions
Whiskey
From Facebook to billboards to bathroom stalls, advertisements are everywhere. It’s no secret that we are being marketed to almost constantly from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep. In fact, Media Matters estimated in 2007 that the average American is exposed to around 600 ads each day. If we assume that a person is awake for around 14 hours a day, that means that we are exposed to a new ad every 1.4 minutes.
Those are crazy numbers and they bring to mind some pretty interesting questions. For one, how can advertising possibly work when we are exposed to so many ads everyday? Most of us have trouble remembering to pick up the dry cleaning, so how can we possibly remember 600 ads? Even if we could remember some of those ads, shouldn’t we be immune to advertising by now? Every ad we see claims that this new toothpaste/car/movie/lawyer/toy is the best one available. We know that they can’t all be right, so it is easy to draw the conclusion that advertisements are not the best source of information when we are trying to decide which product to buy. So why do companies spend so much money saturating our world with advertisements?
The answer might surprise you. It turns out that advertisements may not even need to convince us that a particular product is the best for us to buy it. It just needs to make us remember the name.
One of my favorite examples of how this works comes from an article by Daniel G. Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer published in the Psycological Review called Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic. In this article, Goldstein and Gigerenzer site a study in which a group of Americans and a group of Germans were each asked to answer the question, “Which city has a larger population: San Diego or San Antonio?” Two-thirds of the Americans correctly answered that San Diego had the bigger population. Surprisingly, 100% of the Germans also answered correctly. How could it be that the Americans – who presumably had more knowledge of American cities – had less success answering this question than the Germans who knew considerably less?
Goldstein and Gigerenzer postulated that is was actually their lack of information that gave the Germans their advantage. When they asked the German group if they had ever heard of the two cities before being asked the question, 100% of them said that they had heard of San Diego whereas only half of them had ever heard of San Antonio. Because San Diego was more familiar to them, they assumed that it had a larger population than San Antonio which was less familiar or unfamilar to them. In this case, their lack of knowledge made it easier for them to guess the right answer than it was for their American counterparts.
A similar process often occurs when we go to buy things online. Barring previous experience, brands that are familiar to us tend to seem more reliable to us than brands that don’t. Think about it: would you rather buy a Canon camcorder or an Aiptek camcorder? Is your preference based on knowledge of the brands or does one (presumably the Cannon) just seem better to you because it is more familiar? For most of us it is hard to escape the feeling that familiar brands are better than unfamiliar brands and that is the insidious way in which advertising can unknowingly sway even the most savvy consumer.
Don’t think you can be fooled? Test yourself – Pikimal produces factual results for digital cameras, cars, or heaters. Take a look at the results: which do you trust, the facts or the familiar?
“A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” is a phrase that was made famous by President Herbert Hoover during his 1928 election campaign. At the time the country was still riding high on the crest of a credit-fueled bubble which had created record prosperity and productivity. “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” was beginning to seem like a reality. The economy of the 1920’s was roaring, leading many to believe that the complete eradication of poverty was near at hand. Of course, much like it did in 2008, the bubble eventually burst leading to what we now know as the Great Depression. That was a major setback to the American economy to say the least, but did Hoover’s “chicken in every pot” vision die when the economy tanked? The answer is yes and no. In the decades since the Great Depression, staggering advances in technology have driven productivity to record levels, allowing for more and more things to be produced at a lower and lower cost. The effect is that the poorest Americans – the 13% of us that fall below the poverty line – have more “stuff” than they’ve ever had before. There might not be a car in every garage, but according the the US Census 95% have a refrigerator and 92% said they have enough food. On paper it sounds like we are doing pretty well, so why aren’t people today anticipating the end of poverty as they were in the mid-1920’s?
The answer is that having more stuff and cheaper stuff hasn’t eliminated poverty, but has simply restructured what poverty looks like. It has created new and different challenges. For example, the prevalence of inexpensive, processed foods means that in America we are seeing a phenomenon that is virtually unmatched in all of human history: people who live below the poverty line are more likely to be obese than those who live above it. In the past poverty meant having access to a lower quantity of food, while today it means having access to a lower quality of food.
So what does this mean? The implications are obviously pretty huge. There are a thousand conversations to be had about this drastic change in our economy. The part that we at Pikimal find most interesting is this idea that having more stuff and cheaper stuff doesn’t necessarily improve our quality of life. Consumers at all points along the economic spectrum are confronted with a seemingly endless stream of new products and the decisions that they make about which ones to choose can have a dramatic impact on their lives. For most of us in 2011, the question is no longer “Will I have a chicken in my pot?” but rather, “Will that chicken be free-range and organic or will I hit the drive-thru at KFC?”
These decisions matter. And while the choice between a lean chicken breast and a jumbo bucket of fried chicken may seem obvious on the surface, even this simple decision can be complicated by things like cost and convenience. If you are trying to stretch your paycheck and you live in a part of town that doesn’t have a grocery store, the inexpensive but unhealthy bucket of chicken can be a practical solution to the problem of how to feed your family that night. And that’s just the decision of what to have for dinner. What about bigger, more complex decision like what car to buy, what school to go to, or which hospital to choose? This is where the decision-making waters get even murkier.
At Pikimal our passion is creating an intuitive and transparent tool that gets consumers the information that they need to make the best decisions for their unique needs. We aim to take the glut of products and information available and put them in a format that is easy to understand. We call the tool we’ve created a Piki – it’s like a wiki that helps you pick things. If you haven’t already, I hope that you’ll check it out and tell us what think. Our Cars Piki is a great place to start or just head over to Pikimal and check all of our Pikis.
