Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

How do you get people excited (and talking) about your great new product or service while it’s still in development? Here are five tips that have proven successful:
Tip #1: Motivation
If you are truly starting “from scratch,” with no existing customers (let alone an existing CRM system or even an email list), you’ll need to think [...]

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The following chart from Marketing Sherpa takes a look at how brands and companies can best go about creating brand awareness, increasing affinity, and driving traffic to any targeted brand message. According to the study, in all of these scenarios a majority of brands and marketers turn to Social Media-driven strategy to make this happen.

It [...]

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Following hot on the heels of Apple’s retail store success, Microsoft announced today that they are opening their first “Retail Experience Center”, a brick and mortar home for consumers to  “build connected shopping experiences and consumer loyalty, improve business insights and decision making, create operational efficiencies,” and ultimately, “address rising consumer expectation and competitive pressures [...]

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I started working on our Forrester Groundswell Award entry a while back and re-discovered a topic I had been thinking about a few months ago – “holistic” versus “siloed” approaches towards social media initiatives.
The Groundswell authors break down the opportunities within social media to mirror corporate structures, providing an easy way for people in research, [...]

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A new report from MarketTools reveals that nearly 70% of Americans visit blogs, communities or social networks.  Of all respondents in the study, nearly half have been influenced in their purchase decisions by social media.
Your product is being talked about everywhere by everyone.  A single product review can be seen by millions.  This realization can [...]

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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 at [...]

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