OpenForum.com on Blippy in their article
The 5 Most Innovative New Online Business Models in 2010:

If you don’t live your life in social media, the idea behind Blippy will likely confuse you. It is a social site that lets people automatically share the latest things they have purchased (and how much they paid for them) by linking the site to a single credit card. This level of transparency and sharing may seem crazy to many people, but the site represents a social experiment that points to an interesting opportunity for businesses whose customers may be used to sharing every small detail of their lives. It may be an outlier in this list of business models as they admittedly don’t have a revenue model for the site as yet – but the shift in what people are willing to share online is the real trend worth watching.

By maintaining a social media presence car manufacturers could interact with potential buyers before they head down to the auto showroom.  They could use search.twitter.com to find folks who tweeted about going car shopping or someone who tweeted about their car breaking down and offer to solve their problem by offering a new car alternative.

Sears uses this tactic with appliances. Recently my cousin’s dishwasher broke.  A Sears repairman came to fix it.  Later that same day, the dishwasher broke again.  After tweeting about it, she discovered a message from someone at Sears who was embarrassed by the repairman and offered to solve her problem by giving her a new dishwasher for free!  That is a terrific example of how brands are using Twitter to maintain customer satisfaction. Imagine the possibilities for auto industry!

Implementation strategies for social media use in both car sales and manufacturing can be found in JD Rucker’s post in FastCompany.com’s blog: Why Going Social Can Make or Break the Automotive Industry. In it he explores the potential for dealer and manufacturer impact on client relations using social media.

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20% of tweets about brands is the results of a Penn State study in the States.

Researchers led by Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology, and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury looked at half a million tweets. 20% of them were apparently people ‘asking and providing’ product information. Assuming three million tweets a day, that would translate into 600k posts daily of direct relevance to brands.

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From Ben Parr at Mashable

“Social media is a relatively new phenomenon, but Delicious (), Digg (), StumbleUpon () and other social media websites have become an increasingly important source of website traffic. This also creates a massive demand for data related to social media. Where are users coming from? What topics excite them? These are questions that, when answered, can be the difference between a successful website and a failed social media campaign. But social media analytics is young, and not many people know where to start.

Read Ben’s guide which is designed “to help you get started with some of the best tools and habits so that you can effectively gather and analyze social media analytics.”

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Apparently a somewhat less vital recourse, 35% of the 5,000 U.S. social media users surveyed in May said they could do without MySpace, while a more modest 43% thought life still worth living without Twitter.

Under 35, people rely on social networks for “fun” and contacting friends, while older consumers increasingly view them as indispensable for staying in touch with family and close friends.

Correspondingly, the majority — 75% — said Facebook was their most valuable network, followed by 65% who cited MySpace. Only 30% said the business centric LinkedIn was their most valuable network, followed by the 12% who gave it up to Twitter.

Sysomos

• 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
• New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
• More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
• Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

“We wanted to take an extensive snapshot of Twitter that goes far beyond anything done to document Twitter’s use, growth and demographics,” said Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ co-founder and chief executive. “While Twitter’s growth has been well documented, we wanted to put the spotlight on how people use Twitter, as well as identify many of the key trends in their backgrounds, demographics and activity. Our study, based on the most comprehensive dataset of Twitter users, provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in getting in-depth details about Twitter.”

Social Media

SocialMention.com allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

KeoTag.com searches some of the most popular social media sites for tags that match your search term.

BackType is a “conversational search engine”. They index conversations scattered across the web to make following comments on a post or article a lot easier to manage.

CoComment is a service for managing, powering and researching conversations online. When using coComment, you can keep track of your comments across any site, share them with friends, and get notified when you get a response.

YackTrack lets you search for comments on your content from various sources or other blogs that talk about your content.

Blog Flux is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr galleries, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, i.e a new follow-up, Commentful notifies you instantly.

Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet.

Twitter

Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through the Twittersphere.

Backtweets finds all Tweets linking back to an article or blog post. Site does a good job of archiving older tweets where tweetmeme only shows more recent tweets.

Twitrratr helps you distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.

Tweetmeme is similar to Backtweets except it only shows tweets that link to a post from the last 7 days.

Facebook

Facebook Lexicon lets you compare up to five different words or two-word phrases and see how many people talked about that term on Facebook each day.

Discussion Boards and Forums

BoardReader was developed to address the shortcomings of current search engine technology to accurately find and display information contained on the Web’s forums and message boards.

BoardTracker is a search engine that only displays information from their extensive database of forum threads.

Blogs

Blog Search is a Google search technology focused on blogs. You can do a lot of the normal advanced Google search commands to get optimal results.

BlogPulse is a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere

Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics. It organizes the articles in a trendline that shows the popularity of the topic over time up to three months ago up to today.

A Little Something Extra

I’ve been using the free version of FiltrBoxG2 which has been amazing. It’s very slick and easy to use. I highly recommend checking it out, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Jonathan Bishop is an Internet Marketing Specialist at Magicomm, LLC in Amesbury, MA.  He specializes in Web 2.0 technologies.

1. Twitalyzer: a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.

2. MicroPlaza: a way to discover relevant and interesting items from the people we follow on Twitter. MicroPlaza delivers the filtered links from our Twitter timelines. It’s a discovery engine and a personal newswire.

3. Twist: a way to see trends of keywords or product names, based what Twitter users are tweeting about. See frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period a week or a month and display them on a graph.

4. Twitturly:  tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to their followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top100.

5. TweetStats: shows tweeting behavior of Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and present them in colorful graphs.

6. TwitterFriends: explore the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are really relevant for you, see who among your Twitter friends are online at any moment, read stats about your own Twitter account and identify the Twitterers posting the most links.

7. Quickrate / Thummit: harvests the rich content of the Twittersphere to synthesize opinions on hot topics of the day (recent movies, buzzing memes).

8. TweetEffect: enter your twitter name and analyze your 200 latest updates and flag those up that made people follow or leave you.