This is the third installment of my weekly commentary on trendwatching.com’s “10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010.” After Business Unusual and Urbany, today I bring you REAL-TIME REVIEWS.

This part of trendwatching.com’s report begins:

We recently highlighted NOWISM*, and while that mega-trend in its entirety should be on your radar for the next 12 months, let’s dive into one sub-trend that will be truly disruptive: the rise of REAL-TIME REVIEWS.

In short, with even more people sharing, in real time, everything they do**, buy, listen to, watch, attend, wear and so on, and with even more search engines and tracking services making it easy to find and group these ‘live dispatches’ by theme, topic or brand, this year will see ready-to-buy consumers tapping into a live stream of (first-hand) experiences from fellow consumers.

* Consumers’ ingrained lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that’s building as we speak.



** As more people are reviewing and contributing, the sheer mass of opinions will lead to a real-time stream of information, findable and viewable to all. In addition, online access and device convergence will allow more on-the-spot reviews. Twitter is the much-deserved poster child for real-time reviews: it has established itself as the real-time snapshot of what people are thinking/feeling/experiencing and yes, reviewing, around the world.

When one of the top trends for 2010 is considered to be a “sub-trend” of yet another trend then we know we are deep in the woods of hyper-intetellectualized deconstruction of shit that is happening. Paradigms, memes and trends, oh my! But hey, I’ll play. Especially with the idea of Real-Time Reviews because this is something I have experienced first hand on a few different levels – clients struggling with how to respond to them, myself following them on topics of interest, and contributing to the trend with my own reviews.

Let me give you an example:

As we all know, before Twitter even existed or became the phenomenon it is today, there were blogs. And people who were interested in certain things tended to blog about them. Among many other topics, food became a big source of blog content. Suddenly, everyone was a food critic. And it wasn’t just blogs. Sites like Yelp and Citysearch and Urban Spoon made it possible for anyone who’d eaten anywhere to voice an opinion about that experience. Did it matter that some of those people had the least sophisticated palettes on the planet? Not really, because there was no way to tell the difference between a culinary troglodyte and a budding Frank Bruni in the great democracy of the world wide web.

Corby Kummer, restaurant critic for Boston Magazine, renders his opinion in The Atlantic in The Food Critic In the Internet Age:

To craggy veterans who have spent our lives trying to make a living as writers, the answer is obvious: of course a paid writer is more reliable! We’ve spent years learning perfect impartiality, fairness, and enough about the business of cooking and feeding people to give us extra-special knowledge that confers godlike power to pass judgment. Oh, and we’ve learned how to write, too.

The San Francisco Chronicle lamented when the formerly formal discipline of reviewing became a free-for-all for online amateurs:

If you think restaurant critics from mainstream newspapers, television and magazines are tough on the food industry, you haven’t spent much time in cyberspace. Online message boards, gossip columns, city restaurant guides and food blogs are proliferating and having a profound influence on where consumers spend their eating dollars. The once-genteel discipline of restaurant reviewing has turned into a free-for-all, celebrated by some as a new-world democracy but seen by others as populist tyranny.

When restaurants could rely upon a professional restaurant critic’s actual professionalism when publishing a review that would undoubtedly influence diners and ultimately affect the restaurant’s business, there was no such guarantee or expectation when it came to food bloggers. And this became a real problem for a lot of restaurants. I spent a lot of time in meetings with clients trying to develop a strategy for how to deal with this phenomenon.

Over time, followers of food blogs and recommendation sites are able to track certain reviewers and make determinations about posters’ likelihood of having similar tastes and providing reviews that mesh with their own desires and expectations of an evening dining out, much like they would with bona fide restaurant critics. But the process is time consuming and potentially unreliable. In an economy like ours at the moment, many restaurants don’t have the luxury of time to let the dust settle after a few bad tweets before their goose is cooked.

So what is a restaurant to do?

I’m going to skip to the conclusion of trendwatching.com’s report, because it speaks directly to the answer to this question.

Oh, and how to deal with REAL-TIME REVIEWS? Either outperform so reviews will be positive, or adopt a radical ‘beta-mindset’ (re-read our FOREVERISM briefing for more on this) which means you involve customers in your development processes from day one, eliminating the possibility of out-of-the-blue bad reviews upon launch.

Despite that fact that on some level I agree with the position taken by those who believe that restaurant reviews should be left to the professionals, I actually think that the proliferation of intelligent and thoughtful amateur food writing is actually a good thing for consumers because it means that restaurants actually have to work hard to provide great food, good service and excellent value on an ongoing basis. Not just for a while before they’re confident all of the reviewers have made their pseudo-surreptitious visits, but for real and all the time.

Back to the REAL-TIME REVIEW trend report:

Next: Just because they can (Twitter’s Direct Messages come to mind), consumers who will need more specifics after reading a review, will want to get in direct touch with the reviewer. And because of the self-selecting nature of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, these direct conversations will actually be welcomed by the reviewer, too. By posting reviews for his peers, he or she is almost angling for a follow-up. This will lead to real conversations between like-minded customers and potential buyers, without the brand even being able to monitor what’s being said about its products, let alone being able to respond.

To continue with my restaurant example, there actually is opportunity for the savvy brand to be a part of this conversation and not simply a clueless victim. A number of restaurants I know and frequent are particularly adept at using social media to their advantage. They have active and engaging Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and – whether it’s the chef who happens to be into it or someone at their agency who is paid to do it – they participate in comment threads and respond to comments about their restaurants. When the brand is part of the conversation it can be a mutually beneficial relationship. The brand gets valuable feedback from a targeted audience and the customer feels heard and included, two things that actually serve to make them a much more loyal customer in the long run.

Love this stuff? Then do read trendwatching.com’s TRANSPARENCY TRIUMPH and NOWISM briefings too. “No rest for the wicked!”

Next week: (F)luxury

Source: www.trendwatching.com. One of the world’s leading trend firms, trendwatching.com sends out its free, monthly Trend Briefings to more than 160,000 subscribers worldwide.