Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Abrams Research released a Social Media Survey this month, where they surveyed over 200 social media leaders from the US/Canada during Social Media Week (during January 2009). Their key findings are not surprising to me as a Social Media marketer, but happily reinforce much of what we believe to be true: brands should be on [...]

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The recent, unannounced changes to Facebook’s terms of service seem to have gotten many folks up in arms. While this has caused a stir among consumers and privacy advocates, it is also raising flags with brands who are voicing concerns about what this means about ownership of their profiles, relationships, and data. Can Facebook use [...]

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Recently, reports from the BBC and Washington Post have raised questions about the privacy implications of applications on Facebook, MySpace, and other sites. As usual in today’s journalism, there is a bit of sensationalism, a little fear mongering, and a dose of misinformation tossed together with a few actual facts. In order to really understand [...]

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One of the most frequently used phrases regarding social media applications is “viral growth”. In an ideal world, this would mean that apps would provide some value to users who would then pass it on to their friends. In reality what happened is that the primary business model rapidly became forcing users to spam all [...]

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There’s a certain catch-22 in social media: everyone wants to use the thing that everyone else is using. Critical mass is, well, critical. But getting to that critical mass from nothing is the tricky part. Such has been the fate of OpenID, the essence of which is the idea that people should share their login [...]

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The phenomenal growth of Facebook after launching its application platform in May 2007 sent shockwaves to all other social networks. Where sites like MySpace had previously been actively attempting to block external widgets, they all began scrambling to implement their own APIs and embrace third party developers. Now, a year later, the primary competitor to [...]

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