Web 2.0 Is A Dirty Word…
Or should that be “Words”?
However, you cut it and define it, there’re marketers out there who do their best to make use of Twitter, Squidoo, Hubpages, MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, Metacafe, Youtube, Revver, forums and other social networking site (of the “Web 2.0” ilk) to generate adsense or affiliate income.
Some of them are spectacularly successful, while others just flame up and die, and have their accounts deleted en-masse.
So is Web 2.0 a “dead” technology for marketers?
Are Web 2.0 site destined to become a dead graveyard populated by “internet polluters“?
I don’t think so.
This issue came up during the taping of a Friday Podcast session with Affiliate Classroom’s Marketing VP and affiliate marketing industry veteran Rachel Honoway.
I was pretty impressed that Web 2.0-based affiliates ranked alongside SEO, PPC, Coupon, shopping comparison and other types of profiled affiliates in Affiliate Classroom’s new AC Certified program for Affiliate Managers.
If you recall, Jim Kukral presented a session on “Bloggers as the Next Generation of Super Affiliates” at Affiliate Summit West 2007.
And it’s great to see these new generation of affiliate marketers being profiled in the new program, and even better, there’re tips for new and experienced affiliate managers to reach out to these marketers.
But back to “Web 2.0” for a second.
If you’ve been reading this blog over the last couple of weeks, you’d pick up the thread that this new breed of affiliates is focused on building conversations/conversation marketing as Internet Geek Girl Steph Agresta would say.
It’s about relationship marketing and community marketing…permission marketing plays a part in there as well.
For it to be truly effective, you need to be able to meet your prospects needs, and not bank on using a bunch of bulletins or PMs or mass broadcasts to bombard them with irrelevant offers (even at $100 a lead…), just because the technologies let you do so.
If I had my way, I’d hit the internet and do a global “search-and-replace” and replace all references of “web 2.0” with “social traffic” or “community building”.
But then again, isn’t enforcing your opinion on a mass basis, the equivalent of “curation” (a nice politically-correct phrase for “censorship”)?
I think I like freedom of expression better, so this is going into my Twitter stream.
–
Keep an eye out for the Friday Podcast with Rachel Honoway tomorrow – there’re some goodies in store.
Sam Harrelson
March 27, 2008 at 9:20 pm (16 years ago)If you’re marketing to social media or web2.0 channels, you’re doing it wrong and you’re a spammer in my book. In other words, you don’t walk into a real life keg party and start trying to sell people tupperware they don’t want, do you?
There’s a much better way to market with these platforms in the sense of providing real benefit to an audience, community, tribe or group.
Sam
Andrew Wee
March 27, 2008 at 10:42 pm (16 years ago)Hi Sam,
Good add-on.
I think the various channels are enablers and provide leverage, provided the core message is compelling, provides value and builds a relationship.
Else, even if you build 1,000 “social” sites, the one-hit traffic you’d attract won’t even register in the social environment’s radar screen.
Shannon
March 28, 2008 at 7:29 pm (16 years ago)I can’t agree with Sam.
How can you compare a keg party with a site like squidoo? Squidoo is a content site. It’s a place for people to create lens and share information on any topic they please.
As long as the information is useful and the visitor is happy to have gotten that information, then I don’t see where the problem is and I can’t see how that’s spamming.
Now having an automatically generated article on knitting with links to male enlargements… that’s a different story. That is spam. It’s spam because the content is junk and the links are completely irrelevant.
~Shannon
Sam Harrelson
March 28, 2008 at 9:19 pm (16 years ago)Hi Shannon-
Squidoo is about as far from a “content site” as you can get and a terrible example of social media platforms. It’s overrun with spammers and affiliates looking to make quick money b/c they read an ebook about how to game the service.
My point is that you can’t operate, as an affiliate, on a reputable platform such as Twitter or Facebook by doing noting but broadcasting marketing messages. You have to engage, create unique quality content and be interesting (which is often the antithesis of what online marketing encourages).
It’s not an easy prospect, but the rewards are there.
Sam
Shannon
March 28, 2008 at 10:28 pm (16 years ago)Cool. That explains it much better. I fully agree that you can’t market to users of facebook and twitter by just broadcasting marketing messages. That’s just annoying and will get you no where.
That’s why I enjoy following @Ed_Dale, @DanRaine, and @joelcomm on twitter. They don’t just broadcast messages. They’re interesting, informative, funny, and you can have direct conversations with them.
They use the services the way they’re intended to be used (except lately Ed had a brain fart or something, posting multiple messages that are the same… lol).
~Shannon
p.s. yes there is a lot of junk on squidoo, but there’s a lot of junk everywhere online… and most of it is not even from marketers… 🙂