Who is in control of your brand?

Thanks to Krisite Wells at Social Media Club for finding this market research by Rubicon. It’s a very comprehensive study, however, social media‘s influence on purchasing decisions is second only to word-of-mouth/personal advice.

It’s funny when companies says “Social media sounds exciting, and we’ll getting into it once we’ve upgraded our website” as it’s in no way their choice if their product, service or organisation is ‘in social media’.

The following graphs summarise these findings well.

As Krisite comments

that shows online reviews and comments written by users are second only to word of mouth as a purchase influence for most Americans. Some great stats in this document for you all to chew on including items such as websites that Americans value most are (in order), Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook.