Person-to-Person Marketing – Time to use the Power of your customers

I was just reading a very interesting report of Dr. Sandeep Krishnamurthy. He has some really interesting insights about Open Source Marketing and Consumer Generated Media.

Although this report is from 2001, it has still a lot of valuable for the marketers of today (I think even more valuable then in 2001, because most of his hypothesis became true with the evolution of Web 2.0 and Consumer Generated Media).

For example - some of his facts are:

Fact 1: For most companies, the volume of customer-to-customer
interactions is greater than customer to employee interactions.
Fact 2: Consumers purchase decisions and shopping or service
experiences are routinely affected by other customers.
Fact 3: Consumers find the recommendation of a fellow consumer
more credible than the suggestion of a company employee.
Fact 4: Consumer-to-consumer relationships are ill-defined, hard
to control, constantly changing and organic.

If you look at the development of social networks like “Second Life”, MySpace or StudiVz or on the rise of technologies like video platforms, online games or Blogs you can find a lot of truth in his report.