The local review-sharing site Yelp has added Facebook Connect to allow users to easily share local business reviews with their friends on Facebook. Yelp allows anyone to submit a review for any local business, from restaurants to shoe stores to mechanics. Once you’ve registered and written a review, you’ll now have the option of using Facebook Connect to post the review to your Facebook page so your friends will see it in their feeds. You can set up an automatic posting feature to pull every review you write over to Facebook, or choose to post only certain reviews...

Companies who don’t have iconic brands with millions of adoring fans, often have to resort to other ways to get the attention of the market. This isn’t evil, nor is it uncommon, it’s just business, and was here before the web, and will be afterwards. Don’t get mad or emotional about it, let’s break it down to understand how it’s going to work, if you’re a concerned user, use this post to figure out how to beat it. If you’re a marketer, figure out what works –and throw away what doesn’t. As a result, we’re seeing some of the same method applied to the web and email as to the social space. Here’s three examples (again in outline form) that I saw this week...

Are people social networking at work? More than half (55%) of office workers with Web access have at least one social networking account, but only 43% use it at work, and typically for less than 30 minutes per day, according to a new survey by WorkPlace Media. It might please employers to know that workers aren't hanging out on MySpace or Facebook all day, but social media advertisers probably won't be overjoyed. Even less encouraging for marketers, the study found that not having a presence on a social site made no difference to people's opinion of a brand. And only 11% follow any major brand on a social network...

With maturing strategy models, assessment methods and new reporting and analytic tools, businesses look differently at social media compared to just one year ago. Clearly marketing was the early adopter of social media, created campaigns and explored ways to capture the attention of customers and prospects. It is less expensive than traditional advertising and at the same time more effective in getting new customer attention. But at the end the successful companies started elsewhere...

This is the second post in our three-part blog series with Rebecca Lieb, Econsultancy’s Vice President of North America. Econsultancy, the UK’s leading source of insight on digital marketing and e-commerce, has been a partner and resource to Bazaarvoice in the UK for over two years and is now launching its US office in New York City. Here, Rebecca shares her thoughts on monetizing Twitter and social media. Read the first post on growing the new US office, and keep an eye out for the next post in this series...