The Promise and Peril of Social Search by Erik Sass

Microsoft is rolling out some interesting new features for its Bing iPhone app, which have the potential to totally change the search experience for users by incorporating content from their friends' Twitter and Facebook accounts into search results. This is obviously a cool new capability -- but I can also foresee some potential problems arising if marketers try to combine this function with social commerce. ...Read the whole story

  • retail Golfsmith, Nike Team For Social Media Event by Sarah Mahoney

    "We've really ramped up our social marketing efforts and, like all retailers, we're trying to figure it out," Golfsmith's Matt Corey tells Marketing Daily. "This effort with Nike was one where we wanted to do something really unique, and we really hadn't leveraged our Facebook fans, to do something specific just for them." ...Read the whole story

  • Look Ma, No Hands: More Than Half Of Companies Say They Are Using Social Media With No Strategy by Gavin O'Malley

    While 78% percent of corporate respondents say their company is using social media, only 41% say they have a strategic plan in place to guide such activity, according to a new study from marketing firm Digital Brand Expressions. Of those companies that have some semblance of a social media strategy, 94% say that marketing activities are included in the plan; 71% said public relations were factored into the equation; and 55% say that they use social media for sales-related activities. ...Read the whole story

Social Media Moms Diced and Sliced by Jack Loechner

According to the results of the 2010 Mom Social Influencer segmentation study by BabyCenter, five unique segments of social moms are broken down into two categories, the Influencers, Field Experts, Lifecasters and Pros, and the Influenced, labeled in the report as Butterflies and the Audience. The Influencers make up only 18% of social moms, but they wield 78% of the influence. Tina Sharkey, Chairman and Global President, BabyCenter says "Since 2006, the number of moms using social media has skyrocketed more than 500%... marketers (can) shift their mindset from social media to social marketing by gaining a better understanding of ...More

  • How Facebook Gets to 7 Billion by David Berkowitz

    "Ubiquity" was one word that struck me when David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect," kept mentioning it at a Gotham Media Ventures breakfast panel last week. The other was "China." Those were the answers. The questions, if you summon Johnny Carson's Carnac, were, respectively, "What is Facebook's goal?" and "What is Facebook's biggest obstacle in achieving its goal?" ...More