Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

(note: This post isn’t meant to be a critique of the recent WOMMA Summit but rather my general observations about the evolution of the WOM industry as a whole.)
I recently returned from WOMMA’s Word of Mouth Marketing Summit in Las Vegas. It was a fun (yet sleepless!) few days and it’s always great running into/reconnecting [...]

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Here at Affinitive we strive to find and improve upon metrics for measuring offline conversations about our clients’ brands and products.  Online is easier to quantify with the tracking technologies available, but offline has always been a complex process and often difficult to measure accurately.
One of our current methodologies involves a survey distributed to a [...]

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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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Two related, but equally-important concepts related to word of mouth are “social capital” and “social currency.”
Social capital can be best defined as an “investment in social relations with expected returns in marketplace.” It deals with the value of an individual’s social network/connections.
For example, let’s say you have a great new product that you’d love to [...]

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A recent backlash to the phrase ‘join the conversation’ has erupted from the social media crowd (see here, here, and here). Regarding the last article, I agree a community is a highly effective way to show consumers you care.  But the technique of “joining the conversation” isn’t a bad one, and considering our company, Affinitive, [...]

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This post was inspired by some events that transpired over the past week.  In a nutshell, the teenage daughter of a well-respected and all around nice guy in the WOM industry recently went missing. When word got out, it spread like wildfire and spurred a flurry of good samaritanism among others in the industry who [...]

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