MARKETINGPROFS — Though consumers turn to Facebook primarily to connect with friends and fill downtime, product discounts and "social badging" are the most commonly cited motivations for "liking" brands on Facebook, according to a survey from ExactTarget and Co-Tweet. Over two in five surveyed Facebook users (43%) say they "like," or are fans of, at least one brand on Facebook. Among them, 40% say they like brands to receive discounts and promotions, whereas 39% say they do so to publicly display their brand affiliations to others. By contrast, 23% of consumers who follow brands on Twitter do so for social-badging purposes...

MARKETING PILGRIM — ChannelAdvisors’ 2010 Consumer Shopping Habits Survey is out just in time for the holiday season. The free report provides valuable insights for anyone in the ecommerce, B2C space. So, what jumped out at me? Well, it wasn’t so much that 59% of those surveyed start their gift search at a search engine –- with 28% heading straight to a marketplace such as eBay or Amazon –- but what did intrigue me were the starts on just how inconsequential brand recognition is...

HUBSPOT INBOUND INTERNET MARKETING BLOG — Many people still think that the heaviest users of social media skew young. Myth. In fact, according to a recent analysis completed by Pingdom, the average social media user is 35-44 years old. It turns out that this demographic of decision makers is online looking for information about products and services giving B2B tech marketers a compelling reason to pursue online word of mouth as a key component of their go to market strategy...

MACK COLLIER.COM — For as long as I have been working with companies to help them improve their social media efforts, I have heard them explain how worried they are about what their customers are saying online. "How do we make it go away?" or "How do we get this off the 1st page of Google results?" are questions I have heard all too often. One area where this really comes into play is the issue of adding product reviews to your e-commerce site. Many companies do NOT want to do this, because they fear that letting customers post reviews on their site will hurt sales...

SILICON ALLEY INSIDER — Two days ago I wrote about Quora. I’ve been loving the product even if it sucks up some of my time. I prefer my time go into a very focused Q&A website than into a more generic Facebook. What Quora has done is wrap social networking around Q&A with the more clever next-gen UX I’ve seen. But my post today is not about Quora, it’s about an answer that I wrote on Quora. I stumbled upon the Question, "What is the motivation behind writing public reviews and tips as on Amazon Yelp Foursquare StickyBits etc" and took the bait. I wrote the following answer...