| > Word of mouth doesn't work for super niche services/products Nonsense. See, there are (were?) lots of niche specific publications and communities. They'd actually know about a subject, and provide informed and largely unbiased advice, and carry advertisement, of course. Similarly, there were regional newspapers, carrying information and advertisement of regional interest. TV and other broad media could not steal their advertisement dollars, because that was the only way to reach the niche or region. What Facebook is doing is to usurp all of that and monopolise advertisement, driving smaller niche and regional publishers out of business. Their hypocrisy is astounding. > there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product I think the trust problem has gotten much worse. As I said, there used to be niche publishers supporting communities (by interest or region) that were interested in keeping these sustainable long term, and therefore would not be interested in scamming their audience. Now, these publishers have been bled dry, and you have to find your information on the world wild web, where any scammer and fly-by-night producer can target you and link farm and buy fake reviews etc. |
Perhaps I should have said "in the modern world, word of mouth doesn't work..."
Today, chances are those niche publications & communities are going to be online. And how do we determine the trustworthy ones from the ones that are just trying to exploit us? I guess we need to rely on word of mouth to determine which mouths we should listen to words from...