Early studies showed that Twitter contributed nothing to Thanksgiving sales this year, at least in terms of traffic to retail sites. But data from Black Friday and Cyber Monday continues to pour in. Analysts at NMIncite read the posts for shopper feedback, while Silverpop found the brand sites with the most check-ins. These reports showed another trend: even if people weren’t shopping through Twitter, they were using the microblogging site to talk about their shopping plans.
We're kicking off our upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp with a special keynote presentation by Ella Chick (left), the digital producer at Anderson Cooper 360°. She'll discuss how the network uses social media for breaking news and leverages social media to draw attention to organizations and causes. Learn more about our program and register here. 
Social shopping site Fab sold more than $6.5 million worth of bearded hats, colorful knives, and 200,000 more unique products between Black Friday, November 23 and Thursday November 29, 2012. The company reports that sales have quadrupled since 2011, when holiday sales totaled $1.7 million.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday … Now Giving Tuesday (The Christian Science Monitor/AP)
A national campaign to brand the Tuesday after Thanksgiving as an annual day of giving is a product of the digital age, steeped in social media, with its own Twitter hashtag: #GivingTuesday. The movement’s founding partners include traditional organizations such as the United Way and American Red Cross as well as Microsoft, the online bargain site Groupon, and Mashable, the technology and social media news blog.
IBM rocked the Twittersphere this morning with the disappointing news that Twitter contributed absolutely nothing to referral sales on Black Friday. By IBM’s calculation, social media sites referred less than one percent of site visits and an even smaller fraction of sales.
Cyber Monday Deals: How to Find the Best Online Sales and Save Some Major Green (The Huffington Post/Reuters)
In a one-day blitz of shopping, consumers are expected to empty their wallets of more than $1 billion on Cyber Monday, the online shopping spree on Nov. 26, according to spending projections from research firm comScore. Cyber Monday 2012 may offer the best deals on technology products this year, said Brian Hoyt, senior writer for RetailMeNot.com, a coupon code site.
Online shopping continues to grow — faster on the desktop Web than on mobile, according to the infographic below, produced by digital marketing company IgnitionOne.
Today is Thanksgiving—a day to spend time with our families and focus on the things we’re thankful for. But as soon as we’re stuffed with turkey, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie we’ll forget about what we’re thankful for and catch the shopping bug.
Get your pins and tweets ready, marketers, because holiday shopping season is about to begin. To ease stress for retailers, Adobe has created a predictive tool that forecasts sales growth figures and online shopping spikes for the upcoming season, also factoring in referral traffic from social media sites. Referrals to retail sites from social networks are expected double, the company reports, and Pinterest takes the lead as the fastest-growing site for driving traffic.
With all the credit card charges during the holiday season, it signals the time of year when consumers are once again at the highest risk of becoming victim to hackers and scammers. Their schemes have been known to trick even the most seasoned online consumers. Black Friday and Cyber Monday Attacks infographic advises web merchants and consumers on how to avoid falling prey to hackers and scammers.
Infographic by Veracode Application Security
Cyber Monday is upon us, and in the spirit of giving and rampant consumerism, mbStartups would like to point out that it is possible to support the economy as well as local charities just by surfing the Web and buying stuff at Target. GoodSearch.com is a Yahoo!-powered search engine that automatically donates a portion of its advertising dollars to local charities that sign up for the service. Its sister site, GoodShop.com, tracks purchases made at participating retailers from its online mall and donates up to 30% of its online sales to non-profit organizations, with coupons and deals for the shopper. Since the company’s launch in 2005, 1,600 retailers have climbed on board to help more than 94,000 charities meet their fundraising goals. mbStartups recently asked Ken Ramberg, Co-Founder of GoodSearch and former President of JOBTRAK how he and his sister JJ Ramberg turned browsing and shopping into a social venture.
How did the partnership with Yahoo! come about?
A few years after selling JOBTRAK to Monster.com in 2000, the idea for GoodSearch hit me: “What if people could support their favorite cause just by searching the Internet, something that they do every day?” If even a fraction of the ad dollars generated by search engines could be distributed toward good causes, a major impact could be made.
I had a strong relationship with the management team at Yahoo! and approached them with the idea of “powering” our search engine. One of the keys to making GoodSearch a success was to ensure that we provided high quality search results. Yahoo! took a shot with us and the partnership has worked out very well for both of our organizations ever since.
