Here’s my recommendation for one blog, if you want to read great liveblogging – Lisa Barone’s over at the Outspoken Media blog, covering the ASE sessions she’s attending.

You can catch her sessions here: Lisa Barone ASE09 liveblogging. (she tags her posts correctly, so you can bookmark that page for up-to-date coverate).

What makes a great live blogging session is a combination of factual reporting of the speaker/speakers presentation, plus the blogger’s subjective/objective interpretation of whether their words makes sense. A healthy sense of humor and snark doesn’t hurt either.

The SEO folks seem to live blog their seminars most closely, and affiliate summit coverage hasn’t seemed as heavily covered, despite the number of “Press” attendees walking about.

Some other coverage of ASE09:

• Affiliate Summit Co-founder Shawn Collins’ write up at AffiliateTip (from past experience, he’ll likely do end-of-day recaps)
• Possibly regular coverage at WebMetricsGuru
• Possibly regular coverage from Tim Jones

Also coverage from:

• TrishaLyn (initially I’d thought she was live blogging the panel she was on…which would be interesting. Then I saw that a guest blogging was doing the blogging)
• Ayako Bingham on her Branding100 blog
• John Chow’s Meet Market video coverage (with an “attractive girl” that the blog commentars seem to want to get to know better)

For Affiliate Summit East updates, I’d suggest looking at Justin Barr’s AffBuzz.com affiliate blog aggregator for updates.

Looking at the hashtag #ASE09 on twitter might be counterproductive as the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low (especially late at night when drunk affiliates send stream-of-consciousness tweets).

If you’re looking for blog posts, using Google’s Blog Search with the “Affiliate Summit East” search string might ultimately be the most productive (unless the blogs aren’t indexed in google…)

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Shawn has also just posted that Affiliate Summit West 2010 will be held in Las Vegas, Jan 17-19 featuring keynote speakers Dr. Robert Cialdini (author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”) and “Copyblogger” Brian Clark.

Especially if you’ve been traditionally focusing on PPC or Search Engine Optimization to generate leads and sales, these strategies can give you a couple more tools for your arsenal.

Social marketing is all about open communication and visibility. (transparency and honesty are key too).

If you don’t already have an online presence, look at how you want to position yourself.

At the heart of it, a Dell computer, an Apple iPod or an Asus Eee PC is just a bunch of circuit boards and electronic chips soldered together and encased in an aluminum or polycarbonate case. It’s marketing magic that imbues these objects with the emotional associations of style, ease-of-use, prestige, etc.

In his book, “All Marketers are Liars”, Seth Godin mentions how consumers are actually the ones lying to themselves. They imbue products and services with these larger-than-life characteristics and spending their income on “driving machines” and believe that a computer can help them “think different”.

If you’re an online marketer and you aren’t already picking up these tips to up your game, you could be missing out on the massive leverage these strategies provide.

Pickup artists like Neil Strauss AKA Style, Erik Von Markovik AKA Mystery talk about creating personas or social avatars. I don’t see this as very different from a brand that a company creates.

One question might be asked “So, how do I create my identity if I’m new to this?”

Answer: Create your identity based on what you want to be (your outcome) and strive towards it. An avatar is your desired outcome, you build it as a goal you want to achieve.

Having it consistent with your personal thoughts, values and attitudes will help you market via social media and web 2.0 with authenticity and brutal effectiveness. Projecting a picture of yourself as something you’re not is going to be a fruitless exercise down the road.

The pickup artists have put a practical application to Robert Cialdini’s concept of social proof – the idea of DHV’s or Demonstration of Higher Value. In Internet marketer speak, that’s becoming an authority site in your niche. (ok, I’m extending the concept further from its original position).

More importantly, social marketing still represents a pool of huge untapped potential – something like the Excalibur buried in a block of stone. The secret here is that anyone can be the “King Arthur” that pulls it out and unleashes its potential – it’s a matter of stepping up and taking action.

This clip with one of Mystery’s lieutenants, JDog, address the issue of creating avatars. Read between the lines and the same principles of focus, rather than “peacocking” will equally apply in your business too.