recommendation

Curation is already becoming an overused word but it's an increasingly important one. Not least because the way in which we discover content that we like or find useful, and how it gets in front of us or gets our attention, is changing radically.

Guest Post by: Jon Stokes

Making purchases directly from within Facebook (a form of social commerce) has the potential to make the social network a place where we spend not just considerable amounts of our time, but also our money.

I'll admit to feeling a large dose of nostalgia when I think back to Sunday evenings spent listening to the Top 40 Chart Show on the radio, with fingers poised on the 'play' and 'record' button of my ancient tape recorder waiting for the DJ to stop talking over the track intro so I could get a clean recording of it (I'm really showing my age here).

An article in the Creating Results blog has some interesting stats about the effectiveness of referrals in the Health, Travel and Financial Services Industries

By now, we all know that we live in a world in which word-of-mouth rules.  The recommendation of a friend or family member outweighs anything a brand may have to say for itself.  

I love how Razorfish makes all of the charts from its Feed report available zipped up in one convenient folder -- with all the powerpointage going on, it makes the brand very spreadable. Separately, you have to admire the effort that went into illustrating each of these reports (I already did last year).

Online retailers are doing relatively well in the current economic climate. Whilst spending is down across the board, online retailers are doing either significantly less badly than their traditional competitors, or they are actually performing strongly. Both ASOS and Vente-Privee are seeing relatively strong performances in a weak retail market.