Three out of five Americans go online to influence the opinion of other people, and twice as many to socialize than to shop. I suppose that speaks a lot about the intent of folks participating online whether it’s Twitter, blog commenting, sharing with Digg or shopping on Amazon. So with that, the folks at Public Relations firm Ruder Finn bring us the Intent Index. Now we know why we do what we do and it’s all presented to us in a pretty Flash interface.

Link: Intent Index

Link: Ruder Finn

Kyle Lacy lists for us 20 Ways to Engage Contacts in Social Media:

1. Start a blog. This seems like an obvious one. This should be one of the first things you think about doing when contemplating using social media as a marketing tool. There should always be a hub where your contacts can interact. The so called “hub.” Wordpress is a great tool to start blogging. Get on it!Kyle Lacy, Social Media – Indianapolis, Apr 2009

That’s right…lazy. But I don’t think of lazy as a bad thing – it’s a good thing when it’s in the context of working smarter. So with that excuse in mind, I’ve installed Zemanta. I haven’t grasped all of it’s super hero powers yet. In fact this post is a trial run for Zemanta to see what it will do for me.

So far I love the ability to suggest images based on what I am writing, while I am writing. Next, I may see what it does when I plug something on Amazon.com.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Semantic Web helps to publish a post (blogs.netedu.info)
• Zemanta API Showcase: Triond’s Suggestive Images (zemanta.com)
• Mikes state of social media (techwag.com)

It’s one thing to provide a forum for feedback or comments, that’s great, but what do you do with it? How do you involve the community as a whole?

“UserVoice adds structure to feedback and reduces the overhead of an honest dialog with our users — It creates a market around good ideas so we get more quality than quantity.”

Uservoice provides a number of features toward community development of ideas and feedback. Customers or site visitors vote on comments making the stand outs…well, stand out.

UserVoice – Customer Feedback 2.0

Related articles by Zemanta

• Future of PR: When Agencies Represent Communities – Not Brands (web-strategist.com)

FriendConnect commenting plugin – Yoast – Tweaking Websites.

I’ve just installed the Google Friend Connect commenting plugin from Joost de Valk. It just works. Thanks Joost! I’m looking forward to seeing how the Google’s Friend Connect works for myself and for bloggers or site owners in general. Another reason to buy into Google.