I’ve recently found an excellent website (listorious.com) where you can find experts on a specific topic. There I found a colleague PhD student Michael Wu that has done research on the factors of social media influence. Ifound the information very concrete and straightforward that could enrich the current information of practitioners. In this blog I will give a short overview of what he has found.
In many blogs social media is often referred to as a relationship building tool and a customer loyalty tool. However, there are also some critics out there who state that online interaction can not beat face-to-face interactions’. Since I do see truth in both statements I was curious what scientific research had to say about the differences in the quality of online and offline friendships. And of course I would not dare to keep the results to myself. So here is a post about the difference in quality of online vs. offline friendships and possibly a new way of measuring the ROI of Social Media 
Misuse of consumers?User generated internet content has exploded over the years. Individuals post comments on Facebook, upload movies on Youtube, begin their own blog and are co-authors on Wikipedia. In many blog posts marketers are encouraged to use that information for marketing purposes or even advise them to let consumers do their job for them. What I had always wondered after reading such a post is: why would consumers voluntarily let themselves be used for such purposes and generate valuable information for free?
Isn’t it strange that marketing is all about analyzing and researching consumer behavior, their motives, buying patterns etc and that this question has not been raised before (at least not on one of the blogs I follow).
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