Why I Trust User Comments More Than Marketing Copy

I love my Moleskine notebooks.

I’ve been using them for over five years, have gone through at least 10 of them, am a regular visitor at Moleskinerie.com and Moleskiners.com, and know that it’s pronounced Mole-eh-skeen-eh(no, seriously).

Pilot G-2 .05 mm pen with my Moleskine notebook

When I got my first Moleskine, I knew I had a special notebook, so I wanted to get a special pen to write in it. I did a quick Google search for “best pen for Moleskine notebook,” and the top result was a discussion on the Moleskinerie website (in fact, that’s how I discovered the site in the first place).

The number of comments that all touted the Pilot G-2 outnumbered all the other pens other people were recommending, so I took a leap of faith, and bought a small pack of Pilot G-2s, without ever testing a single one.

The writing was so smooth and the pen just glided across the page. I was immediately hooked. It felt like I was writing on butter with more butter. Since then, I have used nothing but Moleskine pens for all my writing. In fact, the one in the picture is the same pen I’ve carried for three years, I’ve just refilled it several times with barrels by cannibalizing a box of other G-2s.

My point is that I bought this pen based on user recommendations, not marketing copy, not magazine ads, not even the Pilot website. (Although, ironically, I bought the notebook because I liked the description on the little card about the history of the Moleskine.) I trusted the opinion of several strangers more than I trusted the opinion of a professional who is paid to tell me what is so awesome about their pen.

That’s what social media has done for us. It has changed marketing so that we no longer believe the professionals as much as we believe our own friends, or even strangers. I’ve had other people buy Moleskines just because I use them. And I was evangelizing about my pen to a friend of mine yesterday morning, and she probably had her own set by the afternoon.

So for those travel destinations, restaurants, and specialty brands who are still relying on traditional marketing to tell your story, divert just a little bit of your marketing budget to social media. Create a place where your fans can talk about how awesome you are, and can share those good experiences with their friends. Let other people do your marketing for you.

How about you? What makes you decide what to buy, where to eat, where to go on vacation? Do you visit the website or look at review sites like Yelp and UrbanSpoon? How much of a factor are user recommendations?

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