I was a little shocked a couple of weeks ago when I received a huge FedEx box in the mail. I’d been expecting some materials from my friend Jim Lillig, but this monster of a box arrived.
It was a bag of schwag from affiliate network Market Leverage. I thought it was pretty clever of them to suss out my mailing address from my domain whois info, and they’re one of the few merchants and networks I’ve worked with who’s taken the effort to courier a box of stuff all the way to Singapore (the shipment costs came up to about $70!).
Many networks and merchants use the tagline that customer service, relationship building is their priority (together with “highest payouts, most number of exclusive offers”, etc), but Market Leverage delivers on its promise.
There was a fair bit of research to compile a list of affiliate bloggers and send them the care packages, together with the t-shirt campaign that the Market Leverage team had been doing – which shows how marketing and promotion ingenuity can bring you massive leverage.
Market Leverage’s president Sal Guarino certainly has foresight in bringing Dina Riccobono and Debby Phillips (the woman formerly known as Debby Banning on board). Dina’s clocked up video product experience working with Next Entertainment (which produced The Bachelor/The Bachelorette/Are You Hot?) and doubtless was instrumental in putting the concept together for the network’s MarketLeverageTV broadcasts. Debby’s pretty established in the blogosphere and her relationships and social networking will help build up the buzz effect among the blogging community. (google around and you’ll see a couple of “I wish I got a schwag bag” blog posts…).
One person who’s happy with the care package I received is my daughter, Bianca.
Although she’s happy with the “Future Blogger” t-shirt, the Market Leverage teddy bear and the Dora the Explorer game for now, I believe she’s eyeing the Flip Ultra which also came in the care package.
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Looking a little deeper in the Market Leverage offers available, I was particular keen on the exclusive offers which have a payout of $20 – $50 per lead or per sale – an area I typically focus on.
If you’re more focused on the zip/email submits with payouts ranging in the $1.20 – $2 range, there’re a number to choose from.
I’ve also had an opportunity to talk with my affiliate manager Erick Bright and it was encouraging to hear that similar to other top-tier networks, Market Leverage affiliate managers are contactable via IM, will give offer suggestions as you’re constructing your affiliate sites, and provide support as you’re launching new campaigns.
Twitter continues to be log-jammed, and I think every social network – MySpace, Facebook, MyBlogLog, all go through this phase.
In the case of MySpace, it’s become the hotbed of unmoderated bulletin spam and private message spam for ringtones, free ipod/xbox360/nintendo WII email/zip submit offers. I bet it’s going to take some doing to clear all that muck.
With Facebook, they’re taken the opposite tack of placing a cap on the number of private messages you can send out, limiting the ability of popular group owners to communicate with their members – forcing some to set up off-site bulletin boards to send broadcast messages out.
With MyBlogLog, the platform has a built a good userbase with its blog widget (though guys like Shoemoney had showed that it was pretty easy to abuse the “recent visitors” feature of it). The major sticking point is that Yahoo! doesn’t seem to have a concrete social media strategy (or at least an integrated one in place). I’m still hoping to see some of its community features like it’s Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Shopping, Mash social platform and MyBlogLog properties come together. And in my book, come together means more than a single unified Yahoo! login to tie the pieces together.
Even a 1-2 page weekly or bi-weekly updates or “What’s Hawt!” newsletter would serve to bring some of the pieces together…
So what’s the deal with Twitter’s sputtering and throttling down the flow of data?
Looks like Twitter is fast becoming a victim of its own success.
Over the past weekend, the microblogging platform seems to have had a major bout of traffic/resource overload and indigestion and went offline for 48 hours or more.
When she came back, she came back sans direct messaging and pagination (I believe it refers to a backlog beyond your first page of tweets).
In addition to conserve resources, third party apps like Twhirl, can’t seem to do API calls more than once every 5 minutes.
This should take a number of steps to increase scalability and stability, although it will take quite a bit away from the “real time” nature of the hybrid IM/blogging type service.
Beyond being a juicy piece of M&A bait for one of the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft tirumvirate, I’m not sure if Twitter has a viable business model, beyond grabbing marketshare and mindshare for the microblogging space.
If you’ve thoughts on the issue, post your comments below:
Twitter seems to have gone down for most of this past weekend. Maybe the Department of Homeland Productivity is seeing if their hypothesis that productivity increases by 517% when Twitter goes down can be proven in a real-world field test.
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The new Battlestar Galatica season 4 on the SciFi Channel continues to be one of the best series on TV. Besides the typical science fiction themes and CGI special effects, the human story is pretty engaging and like any great movie/tv series mirroring real world reality (like Frank Miller’s “300”) it’s amazing how the creators mirror real world events in their storylines.
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Ongoing Project:Â I’ve been working on a blogging-related project since early last year, and it looks like it’s getting into the final lap. Projected completion and launch? Possibly Mid-June.
It’s interesting how this blog has developed since its early root in 2005 from the old blog over at blogspot.
More importantly, it’s amazing how far blogging has evolved in the space of 2 years. (I can still remember when there were only 1 or 2 video blogs listed in the blog directories…now they’re everywhere.)
Yahoo! MyBlogLog had been the hottest blog/social marketing widget in my opinion in 2006 and early 2007. Somewhere in between the balance of power shifted to Facebook, which continues to be dominant for heavyweight networking.
Lately I’ve been gravitating towards using twitter, although the lightweight 140-character cellphone text messaging aspect of it, doesn’t feel very substantial, and conversations seems to ebb and disappear in the deluge of public and private messages being fired off every couple of seconds.
For a while, it seemed like MyBlogLog had been in a holding pattern, and I’d been hoping for some integration either with the Yahoo! shopping properties or its Mash social network.
I may be wrong, but it doesn’t seem like social media/social traffic is a major focus for Yahoo! now, and that’s where it might be missing the boat.
The New Face of Yahoo! MyBlogLog: Tilly “Two Thumbs” McClainÂ
Still, it was encouraging to see that Tilly McClain has been named Yahoo! MyBlogLog community manager earlier this week (it’d previously been under the stewardship of Robyn Tippins and Ian Kennedy previously), and perhaps we’ll see some interesting developments in the coming months.
