Razorfish ‘Fluent’ study – TV still strong, social network consolidation

Thanks to Ben Kunz for pointing me towards this huge piece of research by Razorfish – ‘Fluent.’ The theme is trust and brand perceptions in the online world, or:

“We respectfully suggest that what you say – or your agency says – about your brand or product matters less than what your customers say about you.” (Hence the logic behind the recent crop of social websites)

Though a US survey, I think the findings are applicable to most English speaking countries. Key highlights include:

80% of respondents were members of 1-3 social networks and so concentrate their online activity and profiles. The barriers against new social networks has got a lot higher with a period of consolidation taking place.

Only a minority regularly post online brand recommendations

Most people post online recommendations less than once a month. This is significant as online recommendations was shown by Nielsen to have a 70% trust rating, higher than any form of advertising. A relatively small number of people drive these recommendations (just think of the times you may have read recommendations on amazon or tripadvisor but not actually posted any in return).

Bloggers are good at raising awareness, not so good at making people take action.

Razorfish broke down the decision making process into three – awareness, consideration and action. For the ‘awareness’ phase independent (as opposed to corporate) bloggers had a heavy influence score of 59%. For consideration that dipped to 23% and action 21%. Anonymous peer reviews however increased from 34% at the awareness, to 43% at the consideration and action stages.

Online advertising low authenticity

Just like Nielsen the other week, Razorfish tested various forms of media for a trust score. And the results are a little different.

‘Expert’ online opinions had a high trust score, but amateur opinions not so much. TV ads also scored relatively highly, in fact second to offline friends. Though I accept that TV has made the switch to the online world well, I personally stick with Nielsen’s findings on this as they have a larger (and global) sample size. Or maybe it’s a case in point that you can pretty much find any stats to support an existing point of view!

However I do buy the findings in this chart – that social network, blog, banner and mobile ads have a low authenticity rating.