In our ongoing looks at survey stats and why they often don't mean what you might think they mean, here's a fun one. A new report from comScore and Millennial Media has a chart that looked at "Influential factors when purchasing a product on a smartphone" and beyond the obvious findings (73 percent of all such purchases were influenced by price) was this non-intuitive gem: Personal recommendations (18 percent) were about one-half as influential as customer reviews from strangers (35 percent).
Our initial reaction was that the word "personal" was meant in a social media sense, such as LinkedIn considering every connection of every one of your connection as part of your network—or friends of friends on Facebook or anyone who follows you on Twitter. But apparently this isn't the issue, as one spokesperson for the report said it was considered true "friends and family."
