Today I had the opportunity to attend the “New ‘Rules’ of Engagement, Making Online Shopping Relevant to Consumers” presented by BazaarVoice and RichRelevance. There were a lot of great comments by the speakers / panelists a few of which you can find in my twitter feed but one item came up that I felt was worth pulling out and spending more than 140 characters on. As the title indicates, the issue I’ll be briefly discussing is social media as an awareness tool and not a DR campaign. This point was first made by Patti Evans of Jupiter Research who pointed out that while social has become more and more important “traditional” sources are still driving online sales and people just aren’t turning to social networking to do research. Patti summed up the point basically saying that while social is a great tool, it should be used for conversation and awareness, not direct response.
Continue reading →