Library Revolution

Here’s a post on the “Customer Review Effect” on the Church of the Consumer Blog.

The long and short of it is that retailers in the US, UK, and Europe report an interesting effect resulting from their providing a product review component to their retail Web sites.  According to the full article,

Over three-quarters said their site traffic had increased. Only 5% said it had fallen. Average order values rose for 42% of the responding online retailers, and only 6% said they had decreased.

Ben at Church of the Consmer comments,

Personally, I don’t buy anything or visit any new merchant today without first locating a number of customer-generated reviews for it.

That sounds awfully familiar. My gut feeling is that a lot of us feel that way. I can’t remember the last time I read a book without reading a bunch of consumer reviews before deciding if it was worth my time or not (professional reviews, too, but sometimes I just want to see what other “real people” had to say!). I try to find out what people are saying about the product/service/provider before every major purchase I make (and many minor ones, too!). And even though I haven’t kept track, I have a feeling that the sites where I find those reviews are the ones that get my business in the end.

Writing reviews is something I generally enjoy as well, if I have time. I’m not one of those manic reviewers who seems to have all the time in the world to write detailed reviews of every single product they have ever purchased, but from time to time I do like to express my opinion. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

So what does this mean for libraries? Do we allow our patrons to review our materials in the OPAC? (I’m cool with the idea, but I know that not every librarian is.) Do we provide other public forums for our users to share their impressions of our services? What about giving them some sort of a venue for sharing reviews/opinions/impressions of non-library services, products, etc. How do we assist our patrons looking for information in the form of amateur, consumer-created reviews? Does this assistance include assistance with authoring reviews? … Moderation? … Professional reviews? … Library neutrality?… I could go on and on with questions….

Once again, I think it comes back to the idea of entering into a two-way conversation with our patrons… and in this case, encouraging them to converse with other members of their community.  Now how do we make this work?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Library Marketing, Library Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.