Inspired post by John Bell on the evolution of social shopping over at the Digital Influence Mapping Project. In addition to the standard social shopping fare of soliciting friends opinions, reviewing ratings or reviews by strangers or friends, group buying, finding endorsements from friends or ‘strangers with expertise’, wish lists and registries, affiliate sales networks (e.g. Amazon) and relevant recommendations (e.g. [...]

Are your customers divorcing you? We’ve just been watching this short and snappy “Break Up” video again by the folks at Microsoft advertising. Consumers are divorcing brands on the grounds of bad behavior – i.e. not giving them a voice on your website, and instead just bashing them around the head with 90s style brochureware [...]

Business Week recently ran a special edition on “How We Buy” with two articles on social commerce covering reviews (Amazon) and retailing on/with social networks (Facebook Connect).  Top takeouts below, and full articles archived for reference. Top Takeouts The Internet has become the world’s greatest research tool, and consumers hardly buy anything anymore without first [...]

Customer Reviews Software specialist Bazaarvoice has just published a useful report on the emotional power of participatory media “Participation Chains Connect Customers to Your Brand”. The report is noteworthy because it goes beyond the usual formula; reviews = utility = sales. Instead, Sam Decker and Ze Frank show that customer contributions also foster emotional engagement, [...]

Erik Qualmann, author of Socialnomics, answers tough questions on social media in an interview with IDuniversity. Speed summary (and our take) of the top six questions and answers here. Q1: Isn’t Social Media just for kids? A: The evidence doesn’t support this view – only 11% of twitter users are “kids” (12-17), and fastest growing [...]

Vignette (recently acquired by Open Text) has published a useful review of social media tools for organisations, which we’ve summarised in another post. In the report, Vignette included their own employee guidelines for social media guidelines, which are clear, practical and commendable. So if you’re thinking of developing your own employee guidelines for social media – [...]