I was browsing the Internet the other day and came across an interesting social media platform called AmIRite.com. The award winning, London based site allows users to rate one another's opinions, ultimately answering the question, "Am I Right?"
After exploring the website for a while I couldn't help but notice how clever it was. The ability to rate one another's opinion introduces a competitive element to the social-networking experience - and we all know that people are competitive. AmIRite?!
Additionally, the site provides a platform for everyone to instantly voice their opinion. We all like to be heard and to have a voice; in fact, the right to freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. Yet, with increasing time commitments and hectic lifestyles, it's difficult to find someone to listen: AmIRite provides this listening ear, complete with an audience of over 30,000 people raring to engage in debate.
The fantastic thing about this convenient social-networking website is the ability to rate an opinion with the click of a button. Clicking "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" is the quick and easy way of agreeing or disagreeing with an opinion. It allows a lazy, yet opinionated audience to engage in every debate without ever having to type a word. For the more articulate, there is of course the ability to comment.
I can imagine many people losing hours of their life to this site. The ability to have users instantly rating and endorsing your opinion could be quite gratifying. I can see how addictive it could become, especially as I love reading other people's opinions and am fascinated by what other's think from both a psychological and sociological point of view.
The way that AmIRite differs from traditional social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter is that it not just encourages interactivity, but relies on it. Facebook statuses last only around 3 hours and Tweets last sometimes only a few seconds. Opinions on AmIRite last much longer as the ability to rate allows them to be ranked and sorted. The site was built from the ground up and the unique coding allows the most popular, most unpopular and most controversial opinions to be accessed easily. I would go so far as to say that AmIRite goes beyond trending topics and sorts it's opinions in a way that truly reflects the opinion of its users, not just of the celebrity controlled masses.
As AmIRite's audience grows, which it inevitably will, it will be interesting to see how useful the opinion rating function will become to marketers. AmIRite is like having a focus group of the whole world, where every single person's opinion is given equal weight and taken into consideration. In the future, I can see marketing departments logging on to AmIRite.com to check what people truly think about not just their brand, but also their products. I'm not sure there's ever been a platform where one can so easily gather a consensus of mass opinion.