NYT On Online Reputations 118
prostoalex writes "New York Times analyzes the importance of online postings for the company images and product success/failure rates. Intuit's TurboTax DRM "feature" is mentioned as one of the bad ideas, that was quickly and vociferously opposed by the Internet folk. The movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding got quite a nice cash flow even though the advertising budget was low, but opinions on the Internet regarded the movie highly. Rating systems of Epinions and Slashdot are also discussed briefly."
Its not only the online reputation (Score:3, Informative)
Low ad budget?? (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Winnipeg (where Nia Vardalos is from, originaly, and yes, that's in Canada). I think they spent their entire advertising budget in my city alone, if the above quote is accurate.
I'm enough of a movie buff that I see about 2-3 movies in theatres a week, and let me tell you: 6 *months* before MBFGW was released, I was seeing trailers for it every few weeks. The month before it came out, the onslaught started. Every single movie I went to had a trailer for it, and I do mean *every*. During its run here, ditto. Of course, I could somewhat ignore this, until the TV campaign started in about 2 weeks before it premiered. Suddenly everyone I knew was talking about how 'good' this movie looked, well before seeing it. By the time it actually was making any money in theatres, very few people I knew hadn't yet heard of it (hell, even my parents were asking what all the fuss was about, and it's been several years since they've seen a new movie).
In a city like Winnipeg, all they had to do was mention once or twice that a film created and starred in by a 'Pegger was coming out, and the local media would have done all the free promotion they needed. Instead, we were bombarded with more trailers than I saw for Spider-Man and LOTR:TT combined, and yes, that's a lot
Maybe the rest of the world was spared from this, but up here it was insane. Then again, maybe a 'low advertising budget' just means no superbowl commercial these days.
doesn't always help (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Reputations of people, specifically teachers (Score:1, Informative)
Could these positive reviews don't come from the professors? No - because the system has a unique verification system that other professor review sites do not have that makes it difficult to post bogus reviews without it being obviously known. Even when bogus reviews are posted, it is typically obvious when you read a generic gleaming review or two for a professor that has otherwise extremely detailed negative reviews.
TeacherReviews.com [slashdot.org] is also very different than other professor review sites because it is the only one that requires verification information and detailed paragraph-long reviews, as opposed other sites which are basically just an anonymous vote-as-often-as-you'd-like survey systems.
Re:Reputations of people, specifically teachers (Score:2, Informative)
The survey was performed by the dean of the department, and was somewhat anonymous (i.e., no names assigned, but certain guesses could be made by class rosters). This has the benefit of not being available for any Joe Internet user from falsely adjusting the statistics for a specific teacher, but the drawback was that the general student population was never really made aware of the results.
I suspect the school as a whole would not want these results posted for anyone to view, as it could potentially paint the school's faculty in a negative light (and in my experience, anything that made the school look even somewhat questionable was usually oppressed). However, the data probably more accurately reflected the opinion of the students. Maybe if this survey taking became standard on an inter-university level, some sort of governing body could institute some sort of web ranking of professors (and even schools for that matter). Okay, I'm done rambling...for now.
Re:And brace yourself for a major bloom of astrotu (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Shaping how movies are made, as well (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Reputations of people, specifically teachers (Score:4, Informative)
The only portion of student-submitted ratings that were helpful to me were the free-form comments where some took the time to make constuctive criticisms and suggestions. That was the feedback that helped me improve, not trying to boost my score to college's most favored instructor...
So, to get back to topic, ratings without some sort of backing context, removal of biases and favoritism, planted comments, and consideration of reputation of reviewer, is next to worthless.