A tactic used by most of local tourism stores in a central Vietnam town, is based on targeted recommendations. As soon as a tourist stops by one store and makes any purchase, we are asked to write something in our home language about the experience or product we bought. The testimonials are then shown on sight to new tourists from the same country as it is written. Happens to be a very interesting and rather effective tool which captivates interest in the store by the country/language experience approximation.

In the web we increasingly see similar and better practices. Since early Amazon started working on collaborative filtering, the method of making automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users (collaborating). When you trust Amazon and in relevant messages, it is very likely that you might buy something they recommend. Amazon’s recommendations might suddenly turn your 20 dollars into a 100 dollars order. Multiply that by a million and it is easy to see why collaborative filtering is so important for Amazon. The list goes on from Netflix to a dozen music websites, and so on.

Online or offline, people are increasingly looking for authenticity, real interactions, relevant recommendations. Whether using customer’s testimonials, feedback to attract others, or link the interests of many users, you can smartly bring more value by recommending relevancy. If your products or services are definitely relevant and genuine, you’ll probably get organic growth by improving the brand experience and thus word of mouth.

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