Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Welcome to Social Media Playground, a place to discuss all things related to word of mouth (WOM) and social media marketing. Brought to you by Affinitive, a word of mouth and social media marketing, technology and strategic solutions firm located in New York City and San Francisco.

Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Entries from March 2008

Unofficial Brand Applications on Facebook

March 17th, 2008 · View Comments

An interesting new phenomenon is emerging in social media: the unofficial brand app. In this age of file sharing and remixing, it’s not uncommon for people to appropriate content for personal expression or consumption. But these are quite different than fan pages or shared MP3s. These are deliberate business ventures and they raise interesting issues [...]

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Tags: Social Media

Teaching Brand Marketers about WOM Marketing

March 16th, 2008 · View Comments

With consumer brands increasingly moving from monitoring conversations to executing word of mouth marketing programs there is a growing need for clarification of the various options available to a brand marketer when executing a WOMM initiative. Most everyone we talk to understands the need and importance for word of mouth but since it’s still a [...]

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Tags: Industry News · Marketing

Complement Consumers’ Social Habits to Spread WOM

March 13th, 2008 · View Comments

Word-of-Mouth is a fickle beast. It is difficult to trigger WOM for a product, but it is even harder to determine how the word will be spread, how the message changes, and who it will reach as it goes from one generation of consumers to the next. Keller Fay Group released research showing that 90% [...]

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Tags: Marketing · Research

Word-of-Mouth Leading Purchase Influencer for Electronics in 2007

March 11th, 2008 · View Comments

More than four in 10 consumers aged 18+ (42.6%) say their electronics purchases in 2007 were influenced by word-of-mouth (WOM), according to a recent study by BIGresearch. Medium 2007 Word of Mouth 42.6% Read article on product 34.3% Newspaper inserts 30.5% Broadcast TV 27.9% In-store promotion 27.4% Magazines 24.7% Coupons 23.1% Direct mail 22.5% Internet [...]

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Tags: Industry News · Research

Word of Mouth Theories and Metrics Coming Under Fire

March 10th, 2008 · View Comments

Two recent articles have caught my attention that attempt to challenge some of the fundamentals of word of mouth marketing theory and metrics: The first, Is the Tipping Point Toast, discusses challenges being made to the “influencer” model made famous in WOM101 books The Tipping Point and The Influentials. In it, Duncan Watts, a researcher [...]

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Tags: Industry News · Marketing · Research