From The Internet Retailer survey of IRNewsLink e-newsletter readers conducted in August 2009 with e-mail marketing and survey firm Vovici Corp:

“Social marketing was a top priority for 49.5% of survey respondents this year, compared with 35.7% for video, 34.1% for blogs or customer ratings and reviews, and 22.5% for live chat or product personalization.”

Lots of other interesting stats there about Emerchant priorities. Worth a look.

Here’s the TurnTo presentation from the OnMedia conference today.  This talk focuses on the whole idea of “Trusted References”.  The TurnTo part goes from roughly minute 1 to minute 10.  (I’m hoping the conference will provide a version of this without the side-bar.  I’ll upgrade if we get one…)

I just got back from the Social Networking Conference in Miami.  Here’s the presentation I gave, titled “Ecommerce Meets Social Networks: A Different Approach to Driving Online Referrals”.  The usual caveats about slides-without-accompanying-commentary apply.

We just rolled out Rave.  If you’ve had a particularly good experience with a product from a TurnTo network site - the sort of experience you’d normally tell your friends about - rave it.  Your TurnTo friends will see your rave in their TurnTo news feed, and you can also push it out to your Facebook friends.  (Coming soon: you’ll be able to push your raves out to other networks, Twitter, and the like…)  Other people can see your raves, too, but we don’t push it to them, and they don’t see your name as the author.

How come only “rave” and not “pan”?  The main idea behind rave is to make it easy for you to bring something to the attention of your friends that they might find valuable.  Getting warned off of a bad product is useful mainly if you were already considering it.  There’s no need to tell me not to get something I didn’t want anyway.  But getting alerted to something really special can spark a brand new idea.  Plus, we wanted to focus on the positive.  And a lot of our partner sites already have tools for collecting ratings and reviews, so we felt it was more important to focus on the communicating-with-friends aspect than on collecting scores and feedback.

We’d love to hear what you think.  Please drop us line.