influence

In the UK, Germany, and France the Internet has about double the influence of television when it comes to consumer decision making according to the Digital Influence Index, a study done by Fleishman-Hillard and Harris Interactive.The study found that consumers use the Internet in a number of ways to make decisions. Consumers are more likely to seek opinions of others by visiting social media and product rating sites when making choices that have a major personal impact.

Just what we want to hear - bad news about the housing market, but this time online. Turns out online searches didn’t have as significant impact on homebuying or renting decisions as we may have hoped. That doesn’t necessarily mean real estate sites should pull back their budgets though.

The concept of opinion leadership - that 90 percent of the world is influenced by the other 10 percent - came out of a study conducted by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet.back in 1944. Chasing the Influencers is the search for that 10% and has long been a part of a PR and marketing. In that early study opinion leaders are defined as people who are more influential within their social networks than others. Isn't that interesting - within their social networks. The more things change the more they stay the same.

Blogs have an impact not only on the speed and availability of the news, but also shape the tone and editorial direction of reporting a survey of U.S. journalists by Brodeur finds. Blogs are a regular source for journalists with more than three quarters viewing blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue. Almost 70 percent of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Twenty percent said they spend more than an hour per day reading blogs. Fifty-seven percent said they read blogs two to three times a week.

Google has filed 3 new patents for its Google Notebook service which suggest plans to use Notebook listings as an additional factor in calculating Google's search engine rankings. Bill Slawski reported on the new Google Notebook patents; highlighting the points in the 3rd patent (Presenting Search Result Information) that refer to potential ties between Google Notebook content and Google's ranking algorithm.

If you believe that social media begins and ends with sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg, Reddit and Sphinn, that rock you’re living underneath must be cozy. If you assume social web sites are all about eye candy and juicy talk, you may be right.

The modern Net-savvy marketing consultant advises businesses of all sizes to track what blogs have to say about a brand. BuzzLogic CTO Todd Parsons suggests his firm as a way to seine the blogosphere for those nuggets of gold.

Social networking, blog and political party Web sites have less sway over voter's opinion than recent buzz would suggest. Seventy-two percent of voters said that the mainstream media such as newspapers and magazines are their main source for political information, according to a survey by Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm.