Interesting post by Jordan Julien urging brands not to try running before they can walk when trying to monetize social media.
The basic idea is that you need “social equity” (awareness, reputation, and engagement) to do social commerce.
Julien suggests that brands should first run social media marketing campaigns to build awareness and reputation (by offering something on the fun-value axis), [...]

This is going to be big, Google’s new YouTube Direct service.
Designed for Citizen Reporting, but will allow brands and retailers to run and curate their own YouTube style gallery of reviews, user-generated ads, guides, stories and testimonials on their own websites.  Best news – it’s open source.  Web agencies at the ready…

Continuing our review of social commerce resources on the Web, a presentation below from Ripple6, the social media software company with a community spin on social commerce, entitled “Turning Their Friends into Your Salesforce: Going Beyond Recommendations into Social Commerce”
Top Takeouts

Customer reviews are great, but customer reviews from people you know are better; allow users [...]

Friday afternoon fun post – a hilarious 3 minute YouTube video below called the Social Media Guru – forwarded to me by Birger Bardowicks from blog sponsor Unique Digital, and made by freelance journalist Markham Nolan.  Everything that’s wrong with social media marketing.
Expletive alert, but it’s worth it; the irony is that I bet many social media [...]