I read an interesting story on how social networking is influencing our buying decisions - as it always has done. The new aspect to social networking as a marketing tool is that the power of the internet increases its impact almost without limit. While the social bookmarking sites are a new idea to people like me, the article says that they will be an everyday part of life in the same way as search engines have blended into everyday life over the past ten years. So in future consumers will expect to get recommendations through their online networks for their purchases. In the UK, the market share of blog traffic is driven evenly by social networks and search, according to Hitwise. Blogs receive one quarter of visitors from social networks or chat rooms and 22 per cent from search engines. The challenge for bloggers appears to be how to convert visitors into revenue by ensuring they take the most desired action when they move on - at present . Usually that will mean sending them to a shopping or classified page, but at present only six per cent are doing so. Read the full article: