How Important are Social Product Recommendations?

People still get most of their information about products and services from friends and other people in face-to-face conversations. Email and voice conversations also are frequently used by more than half of respondents to a Colloquy survey.

Company sites, shopping sites, blogs and Twitter and other micro-blogging sites are much less frequently the source of such information. But that is likely to change as the lead edge of younger users become more nearly representative of the "general" or "typical" user.

Some might argue that socially-influenced product recommendations are not as influential as often is thought. But 56 percent of respondents 18 to 25 already say they share such information on social networking sites.