The majority of today’s consumers are actively personalizing their digital experiences and sampling niche content and video with increasing frequency. A quick look at ComScore or Nielsen tells one story: millions of people are logging on to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace and the numbers are growing. We wanted to know if it was simply the technorati leading the way (and leading the hype), or has something more significant occurred? Connected Consumers In July 2007, Avenue A | Razorfish surveyed 475 U.S. consumers across all demographics and geographies to understand their desires, frustrations and digital consumption habits. Our design research team was most concerned with digital behavior rather then demographics. We wanted to know: • How the broad populace of connected consumers discover things? • How quickly do consumers adopt to emerging technologies and user interface conventions (tag clouds, social media, etc.)? • What drives consumers’ desire to purchase (or not) online? • How has video changed the digital landscape in recent years? • Are mobile services being widely used (or not)? Personalization Hits the Mainstream The answer, we’ve found, is that the majority of consumers are increasingly personalizing their digital experiences and sampling a wide range of digital niche content. From recommendation engines, to blogs, to customized start pages, today’s connected consumer navigates a personal landscape that is much more niche than we ever expected. Our survey found that personalization has hit the mainstream. As illustrated in the graph above, the majority of consumers surveyed (60%) personalize their home/start pages. This far exceeds the smaller number of consumers that we previously believed to be such active participants. Further, 56% use RSS (really simple syndication), a technology that enables users to subscribe to content feeds and read them via specialized readers or on their customized start pages. RSS enables consumers to keep up-to-date on news, sports or other information. Clearly this trend bodes well for the dominant portals and search engines such as Google (35%), Yahoo! (24%), AOL (10%) and MSN (9%) which account for the vast majority of consumers’ start pages. Media & Entertainment Habits Shift The desire to personalize and sample niche content greatly impacts consumer’s digital behavior across all industries and verticals. The effect on Follow

Worried about opening your company to consumer reviews? Don’t be. When retailers and marketers talk about social media, one question comes up a lot: what about negative reviews? According to Shop.org and MarketingSherpa studies, less than 26 percent of retailers have customer ratings and reviews, yet 96 percent of the retailers that do have reviews find it to be an effective or highly effective feature. So what is stopping other retailers from adopting this feature? In addition to technology and headcount obstacles, fear of negative reviews is one of the biggest hurdles that retailers — most particularly, retail executives — must overcome in order to embrace ratings and reviews. Yet through many clients and evidence we’ve found negative reviews not only to be necessary, but also valuable. In a recent study focused on product reviews, Patti Freeman Evans, a Jupiter Analyst suggests, “Retailers must take the good with the bad when it comes to user-generated content.  But, because consumers are most likely to report on positive experiences, retailers need not be afraid of the other old adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” Consumers expect to see both good and bad reviews. The good reviews validate seller product information; the bad provide the caveat emptor that retailers cannot provide themselves.” 1. Customers are looking for negative reviews According to an eVoc Insights study, 48 percent of consumers need to consult reviews before making an online purchase. What are they looking for? I often ask friends and people I meet how they use reviews. Almost everyone describes looking for the negative comments to make sure they can live with any shortcomings in products they buy. We all know we don’t live in a world of five-star products, and customers are desperate to know product blemishes before they make a purchase. Lawrence Kerstan, CEO of Despair (those funny demotivational posters) recently bought a Lexus GS300 and researched it heavily online. What’s the first thing he sought in his online research? Negative reviews. He had this car in mind, and the negative comments about the car were nit picks and factors that really didn’t bother him. He had the information he needed to make the purchase. If 48 percent of customers need to read reviews before making a purchase, they are looking for what could be wrong with a product. If they Follow