NP: Burnley v. Fulham

I was a little taken aback by the claim that 28% of holiday shoppers started off with social media, until I realized that comScore seems to be including both customer and expert reviews in that number. While the intro to the article makes it sound like Facebook and Twitter are driving those sales, in actuality, it's only 6% and 3%, respectively, and I would guess there's a high degree of overlap between those two.

Online reviews are a massive marketing tool for ecommerce, and I think lumping them in with social media muddies the waters a bit too much. Of course, you've got companies like Threadless, which really do merge the two in their very essence, but I think that's the exception more than the rule.

All that being said, the specificity of subchannels for online marketing can also be problematic, because the tendency is often to consider them in a vacuum. To their credit, I think that's what comScore is trying to combat by surveying shoppers, because a lot of analysis of the hard ecommerce data has a tendency to stay in those channel-specific silos. But by juicing the social media numbers with reviews, comScore may undermine their own credibility on the issue, as it comes across like they're trying to hype the trend instead of just report on it.