Reviews or Advertising?

A lot of the times people will hear about products or services from advertising efforts from the direct company, or seeing the company at a convention center or some way that the customer interacts with the company with no interference. This is how most people think they interact with products. Well in a lot of cases that would be wrong. The new model that shows how people interact with a product or with a company has a middle man. This middle man is called an opinion leader. Although you may not think it yet I will give you some examples on how this happens.

We are going to be taking a look at the hunting/ outdoor industry. So what I have done is come up with six different opinion leaders that I have found very easily by just a quick search on Google, and on Twitter.

Google –

So what I did was type into Google “Hunting reviews” and at first you see companies that sell products such as Cabela’s and the reason for this is that they are paying for their company to show up first. But the next few sites all produce your opinion leaders. North American Whitetail, Outdoor Life, and Hunting Life all of these websites are used for writing reviews on products that they have field tested to give the consumer a “helping hand”. But what consumers don’t really know is that on the sides of these pages are all advertisements for different companies and products that are sponsoring these reviews or paying to be put there. These websites then turn into an opinion leader because they are the middle man in the process of a customer reaching out to a company or product.

Twitter –

Finding opinion leaders on twitter is a little bit harder, but what I did was search for a hash tag such as (#Hunting) after typing this in Twitter automatically pulls up top results that show the different people and organizations that use this hash tag the most. After this just clicking through and finding the pages that promote products, and have advertisements on the side of their page you will notice that Outdoor Hub is one that does product reviews and also posts stories on up to date events happening in the hunting industry. What you may not see is that the people following them are the companies that you see reviews on. Same goes for Predator Hunter, and American Hunter, these organizations are a way for companies to put their names on these pages that have a lot of followers to market their product through reviews, and just by putting the name out there. The organizations that do this are what they call opinion leaders because they are getting an idea of a product or company inside the consumers head which will pose the consumer to purchase these products.