Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

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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For those of you who might have been following the Forrester Research Marketing Forum 2008 (either via “microblogging” or Twitter), a new set of metrics were put forth to better quantify how consumers engage with products and services.
The engagement model is based on Discovery, Evaluation, Use and Affinity for products and can be used offline […]

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Many marketers are interested in leveraging word-of-mouth, viral, and social media marketing because they view it simply as being “cheaper” than other marketing channels.
This is the wrong attitude. The expectation is small spend, huge results (often in a short amount of time). With traditional marketing channels, there is a linear relationship between spend and return […]

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When Google Maps was introduced in 2005, it was a watershed moment in the distributed web. While Microsoft had developed TerraServer (the first free API mapping service) in 1996, there was something about the elegance and power of the AJAX implementation of Google Maps that unleashed the creativity of multitudes of developers to spawn a […]

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