Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

As an agency, people are often asking us if their company should participate in the latest and greatest social media trend to engage their customers.  It is a good question, but it is usually the wrong one.  A better question might be, “Is my brand ready for this trend?”.  Every new initiative in social media [...]

Social Media Week is upon us! The Affinitive team will be in and out of the New York and San Francisco offices all of next week attending presentations hosted by leaders in emerging social and mobile media. While we are all excited about the number of “can’t miss” events, especially The Interplay of Sports, Business, [...]

The phrase “social media” has evolved to become a blanket term for nearly all things digital, encompassing a diverse set of tactics, platforms, uses and benefits. The following 10 S’s of social media should help explain the key ways in which social media is being used (and abused). 1. Sharing Social media is built on [...]

Contests on Facebook are a tried and true method of Like acquisition and customer engagement. From a Like & Win sweepstakes to a skill-based contest, these promotions can be fun for fans and a great marketing tool for brands. They can also be tricky to pull off; from unplanned Platform changes to holding the attention [...]

This week brought with it some exciting news and stories in the area of social media measurement and, since I didn’t write any of them, I thought I would do my part to highlight some favorites.  I’m not going to trust myself to say that I’ll do this every week, I probably won’t. Here are [...]

Any marketer who has directly measured or quantified the performance of a Facebook page or application knows full well how primitive and unreliable the Facebook Insights dashboard is.  Fan count, page views, and interaction rates serve as the key metrics which, to Facebook’s argument, does provide ‘insight’ into a page, but offers limited access below [...]

There still seems to be a lot of confusion about the definitions of “Word of Mouth” and “social media” and how they are similar/different, so I thought I would kick off the year with a refresher. Put simply: Word of Mouth is the act of people talking. Word of Mouth Marketing is giving people a [...]

We’ve been invited by our friends at GasPedal to present at their upcoming “Supergenius” conference (aka “How to be Great at Word of Mouth Marketing“), where we’ll be giving a talk titled “How Random House is Connecting Teen Readers Directly with Authors”. Click on the video below for a preview of what to expect, courtesy [...]

In the past year Facebook has become all but a staple in an online marketer’s repertoire thanks to their accelerated global growth and widening appeal across demographics.  There are few brands out there that wouldn’t stand to benefit from an official Page for customers to connect with.  Pages have offered myriad methods of engagement, from [...]

That is the question…. At least that’s the question that keeps coming up in conversations with my current / future / probable clients as we look at how to integrate Social Media Marketing into their strategy for 2010. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, it’s no longer an uphill convincing battle of us trying to [...]

“Social Media” are the two hottest buzz words on the block in the big, wide world of marketing.  Diving into the various social marketing platforms – such as Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr (or another blogging platform although I have all my pesos on Tumblr reigning supreme), and the hottest little platform on the list, Twitter, is [...]

On the heels of the first-of-its-kind WOM industry study in 2007, The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), in conjunction with PQ Media, just released their Word-of-Mouth Marketing Forecast 2009-2013: Spending, Trends & Analysis study. It’s chock full of great data and insight, and includes the following eye-opening prediction: Total spending on WoM marketing is [...]