Brian Clark has also stepped in with the legal perspective on what’s kosher and what’s not, when it comes to “word of mouth marketing” AKA social media.

So taking a look at social media for a moment, the medium is very personality-based – we follow individuals (or maybe Britney Spears’ manager firing out tweets on her behalf), and hence there’s greater inferred trust in the communication. This means that when someone is promoting/recommending something, you’re more likely to trust/believe them.

By embedding third party links for products or services you might not be familiar with, and are receving a kickback/commission/payout from, you’re essentially selling your goodwill, for a couple of bucks at best.

Even if you don’t buy the whole “polluting the internet” social argument by participating in this process, you should take a look at it from business and profit perspective.

If you’re buring your credibility promoting potentially second-rate products, you’ll be associated with these class of products. Soon, your followers will realize, you’re at best a promoter of iffy, if not inferior products…and they’ll take their business elsewhere.

In that light, isn’t it better to choose to promote only products you personally use or believe in?

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When it comes to disclosure, I likewise think it’s pretty silly to label your links with (aff) or [AFF]. What’s the point?

I’ve not stepped into a store and seen price tags labelled with a “We may earn a profit from your purchase” disclaimer on it.

When it comes to the net, it’s safe to assume that someone is earning something off your purchase. Even if it’s a donation to a charity via it’s website, the payment processor is still earning a couple of cents processing the transaction.

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Now that we have that out of the way, can we work towards something that makes sense and doesn’t involve ugly, huge disclaimers plastered all over affiliate-run sites?

A minor quibble I have about the Affiliate Summit is not being able to hear presentations by the event’s co-founders Missy Ward and Shawn Collins because they’re busy presenting awards or talking to folks during the 3-day event.

In launching and leading their own new podcasts on Geekcast, this should address the appetite to hear and benefit from their expertise.

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BrandMouthing, a new solo podcast by Shawn Collins, gives his take on branding strategies and marketing techniques that affiliates and internet marketers can employ in their own business. Usually featuring a 5-10 minute duration (the longest has been about 22 minutes thus far), the short, punchy format (with a high signal-to-noise ratio) gives immediate tips.

I’ve enjoyed Shawn’s synopsis of the Cast of Geeks/GeekyBunch sessions when his Skype recording software failed to activate (resulting in a loss of about 1+ hour of content) and the BrandMouthing podcasts likewise provide a short burst of actionable information.

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TheSpew, helmed by Missy Ward, is vaguely themed after popular women-themed talkshow “The View”, with an affiliate marketing slant. Featuring prominent affiliate marketing/internet marketing veterans like Lisa Picarille, Connie Berg, Karen White, Lisa Riolo, Kim Rowley and featuring guests like Brian Littleton, Scott Jangro and others, the sessions are chock full of useful content, involving issues like the California affiliate tax, Missy’s fundraising projects, insights into the affiliate industry.

Bundled together with this, you’ll also hear about how several marketers got their start, get some insights into what makes them successful. TheSpew bunch have also thoughfully included snippets into managing a healthy work-life balancing, addressing issues like dating other members of the affiliate fraternity, networking at events and balancing parental duties with running your own internet business.

Although the sessions clock in at more than an hour, the time will probably fly by and I’ll be saving the sessions to listen to again.

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I’ve certainly got a healthy fill of content and will be looking forward to more episodes from Shawn and Missy.

You can check them out at:

• BrandMouthing
• TheSpew

Listen to the previous Friday Podcast where Missy and Shawn talked about their plans for Geekcast.

During our conversation, we talked about:

• The history and growth of the Geekcast podcast network and upcoming plans
• The expansion and growth of content on Geekcast beyond just affiliate marketing
• Incentives and admission criteria for would-be Geekcast podcasters
• Details and the launch of Missy’s new podcast, “The Spew”, soon to debut on Geekcast in late March
• The addition of video content on Geekcast
• Shawn’s tips on getting started as a podcaster
• How to organize and structure a winning podcast
• The growth of FeedFront magazine
• The upcoming inclusion of AffStat data in FeedFront
• Missy’s new involvement with the affiliate program for DIYThemes (publisher of the Thesis WordPress theme)
• Highlights and details of the upcoming Affiliate Summit East (Aug 9-11, New York City)

Check out the Friday Podcast below:

Links:

• Geekcast
• FeedFront
• Join the DIY Themes affiliate program
  
• Affiliate Summit East

Have the forces of blackhole SEO spread beyond the reaches of Wikipedia and eBay to dig it’s claws into Twitter, as Sugarrae has asserted?

Though Rae mentioned the issue last September, SEO specialist Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl tweeted about it yesterday, together with some choice thoughts:

i mean – do you really believe that twitter links are passing NO credibility, NO juice, NO nothing…?? just like wikipedia ….riiiiiiight.

maybe implement a sandbox for new users
certain threshhold until they are trusted enough to get into a non-robots.txt directory

why not utilize robots.txt solution…instead of nofollow?
i guess nofollow in general just gets me riled up and pissed off

What would happen if twitter got rid of the nofollow on all links? How would it affect the web?

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So why’re we revisiting this issue?

Blackhole SEO is where an inherently social site like eBay or Twitter decides to shut it’s doors and stick “nofollow” tags to outgoing links. So in SEO speak, you won’t get any “link juice” or benefit to your Google PageRank from the PR you’ve built at the site.

Taking a survey, Twitter profile pages (the page that is twitter.com/[your username]) does garner pagerank over time.

A rough survey with either the Google toolbar or the search status firefox plugin yields:

Google PageRank (PR) 4

• Ian Fernando
• Miles Baker

PR 5

• Zac Johnson
• Oilman
• Shawn Collins
• Joel Comm
• Wil Reynolds
• Andrew Wee (me)
• Todd Malicoat
• Reg Saddler AKA Zaibatsu

PR 6

• Darren Rowse AKA ProBlogger
• Michael Gray AKA Graywolf
• Sam Harrelson
• Guy Kawasaki
• Jim Kukral

PR 7

• Chris Brogan
• Barack Obama

PR 8

• Twitter Home page

How do these profile pages build up PR?

It’s unlikely that many twitter users would link build to their user profile, especially since Twitter resides on a public network (ie you don’t own this piece of virtual turf). So it’s likely that these could be links might have resulted from links pointing to your profile page from other twitter users’ profiles, or high authority blogs including blogroll or blog post links to your twitter profile, etc.

If the weight of inbound links is high enough, your twitter profile will earn pagerank. If that’s the case, labelling all outgoing links from your twitter page with the “nofollow” basically tells Google (whom “nofollow” most clearly influences) that the content you’re pointing at does not merit much weight/authority/value…

So given that a PR 5 backlink or 2-way link would be beneficial, the “nofollow” tag may put a downer on twitter users perception of their value to the community, especially since the “blackhole” structure favors twitters own efforts to increase its pagerank.

Granted, there may be some logic in preventing spammers from sqeezing twitter for link juice, but a blanket “nofollow” on links within tweets and on the user profile page (use “view source” to verify the nofollow flag), puts a dampener on things.

As Todd mentions, this blanket approach could be remedied by either a temporary sandbox/holding area for new accounts, or handled via a robots.txt file.

If sites like Squidoo can be effectively managed, and pass link juice to external sites, couldn’t twitter do the same with a little additional intelligence?

If users are spending 1-2 hours each day on your site, why this continued distrust of sites that users are linking to?

If users pointing to poor quality content is an issue, couldn’t the whiz kids at Twitter use some suitable metric to filter the social scammers out?

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Followup post: “DoFollow or NoFollow: The I Can Has Backlink Dilemma“

It was worth the 20 hour plane ride each way, and despite the somewhat hefty tax expense, the benefits far outweighed the time and resources to get there.

This is a first in a series of posts, more to come.

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Pre-Affiliate Summit

Getting to the summit is a good idea, especially with some flights being delayed and having a chance to do some chillaxing before the event. I did some shopping at the premium outlets outlet mall and met up that night with Kim Rowley and Jon Levine.

At most conferences and seminars, I usually learn more from talking to other affiliates about their sites and projects, compared to the formal sessions (unless it’s a brand new area/topic for me).

So we went for drinks and it was interesting to hear about how the program that Jon is managing was put together.

–

Day 1: Sun 11 Jan

I was pleasantly suprised outside the conference rooms by Shawn Collins who danced a welcome jig:

I’d post a video, but the group we were with was too ticked to fire up our flip cams.

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And shortly after, pickup artist Mystery showed up with his entourage and soon a small crowd gathered around him:

I had a chance to check out the “Mysteryplex” AKA “Project Hollywood” mentioned in Neil Strauss’ bestseller “The Game” in Hollywood later in the week. (in a future post).

In many ways, successful pickup has a lot in common with successful affiliate marketing – you need to make the offer attractive, you need to match the approach with your target’s demographic, and you need an attractive “call to action”. The showmanship doesn’t hurt either.

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Later that evening, affiliate network Market Leverage hosted a blogger dinner at Switch at the Encore by Wynn.

(Left to right): David Brim (Izea, back to camera), Market Leverage founder and CEO Michael Jenkins, Ms Danielle, Nate Whitehill (Unique Blog Designs).

Michael also announced the launch of Market Leverage’s Greenlinks – a series of video help videos, at the dinner.

Aside from the great seafood we had, it was also a good opportunity to get insight into Market Leverage’s operations from Mike Kelly (ML’s first affiliate manager) and Jen Fluker (ML’s second affiliate manager).

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Meeting Steph

Undoubtedly, one of the advantages of attending Affiliate Summit is being able to meet networks and get a feel for the affiliate managers you’ll be working with. Meeting them in person also means you have a high chance of being accepted into their network.

I’d been talking to Stephanie Lichtenstein from Andy Rodriguez Consulting over twitter and it was a pleasure to meet her in person. In fact, I swept her off her feet:

Steph, me and Billy Kay Knoblach

Here is a video Steph put up on youtube (it’s received positive feedback from the twitter community)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acybZGnU8sw[/youtube]

Steph’s definitely got an edge when it comes to relationship building with affiliates and social marketers can take a page out of her book.

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Affiliate Triathlon

What I like about the Affiliate Summits is how Shawn and Missy combine fun activities with fund-raising for worthwhile causes. This year’s charity: the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

Some of the “competitiors” were dressed to kill too.

ShareASales CEO Brian Littleton in his 80s Miami Vice (LA Gear?) get up

The ladies from the set of Kill Bill 3: Affiliate Ninjas. Or possibly the ShareASale team (Jessica Sander, Sarah Beeskow, Carolyn Tang).

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Some key takeways:

Video Marketing will continue to be grow this year, with merchants like Buy.com integrating solutions from Qoof and ToldYa! into their affiliate platforms. Buy.com’s Melissa Salas, Qoof’s Michael Stefansky and Market Leverage’s Mike Jenkins gave some good insights during their panel which smart affiliates will be able to utilize in their campaigns.

PPC Pay per click marketing: continues to be a red hot topic with numerous sessions during the seminar track devoted to tracking, optimizing and automating the process. As PPC usage becomes more sophisticated, tools like Wes Mahler’s Tracking202 lower the barrier of entry for new affiliates.

Boutique CPA Networks: A number of “boutique” style CPA networks are rewriting the rules of affiliate marketing. While some affiliate manager are of the “I am here just to tell you the best offers and negotiate payouts for you” mindset, smaller, agile networks like Convert2Media (helmed by Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman) and Ads4Dough (helmed by Jason “Smaxor” Akatiff) are rewriting the rules of what a network is, by going the extra mile to provide guidance to new and experienced affiliates. The fact that the networks are run by top affiliates well versed in white hat and black hat traffic and affiliate tactics also means that they can provide useful and relevant advice.

Next on the list would be the terrific networking events and parties, especially the near legendary ones hosted by the ShareASale affiliate network, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to bring home a polaroid with SAS founder Brian Littleton in his trademark sweatervests.

This isn’t to say that the sessions are to be unrated. This upcoming summit will feature speakers like previous Friday Podcast guests – affiliates Geordie Carswell, Nickycakes, Miles Baker, Jeremy Palmer, John Hasson, Zac Johnson, Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins, Scott Jangro, Buy.com’s Melissa Salas, Amit Mehta, Anik Singal, as well as “Sugarrae” Rae Hoffman, Carolyn “CShel” Shelby, PartnerCentric CEO and founder Linda Woods, affiliate OPM Andy Rodriguez, ABestWeb founder Haiko de Poel Jr, FlamingoWorld CEO Connie Berg, Brian Littleton, SEER Interactive’s Wil Reynolds, Ros Gardner and Ian Fernando.

I think the upcoming summit boasts a stellar speakers lineup and it’ll be a hard decision to split my time between the educational sessions and panels vs time in the exhibit hall.

I managed to squeeze some details from Shawn Collins about the Affiliate Triathlon. He said “There will be three secret events of skill and dexterity and the competitor with the highest overall score wins.” – which translated means you’ll probably have to do something silly and likely mildly embarrass yourself, but will look pretty cool in pictures and do something great for the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

The event which runs from Jan 11-13, currently still has tickets available, though Shawn has mentioned that the bulk of registrations come in 60 days before the event and are available now, though it’s hard to tell how long they’ll last.

The Affiliate Summit is held at the same time as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and adult industry’s AVN (Adult Video Network) awards at the Mandalay Bay. So catching a porn starlet might be a minor perk for some attending the summit? The affiliate networks and especially CPA networks are known for innovative events and mixers at these events, so maybe we’ll see Tila Tequila (former Playboy playmate Tila Ngyuen and star of the “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” reality show). Incidentally, Tila’s born in Singapore and if you think I’m pulling your leg, check out her Wikipedia entry. Obviously, since college students are submitting their senior essays based on Wikipedia, it’s as good as the Encyclopedia Brittanica, right?

But back to the Affiliate Summit…

WineLibrary.tv creator and presenter Gary “Bring the Thunder” Vaynerchuk who kicked butt at the “marketing with video” panel discussion at the last ASW will be delivering the keynote this time. It should be a great session with Gary’s trademark energy, candor and humor.

The deadline for getting your room at the summit group rate of $159/night is valid till Dec 9th, though it’s likely to run out before then. Check out the group reservation rate.

Jeremy Palmer mentioned a code “PKGR2CT” for a $0.02 Tuesday if you stay at least 2 nights. You may or may not be able to use the code in conjunction with the group rate.

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Lastly, get your tickets now if you haven’t yet, the summit reservation link is here. [Use discount code: ASW09WHOISAW to save 10% off any type of pass]

If you have an active affiliate blog or report on internet marketing news, you can apply for a media pass.

Viva Las Vegas.

This time round, the next Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas will feature an Affiliate Triathlon, billed as “designed for affiliate marketers by affiliate marketers”. As affiliate marketing gives most successful affiliates the option to eat and sleep as much as they can comfortably tolerate, the tendency is to put on a little weight around the waist, thighs, face, etc. (With the exception of a couple of notables like Shawn, Missy, Heather Paulson, Ros Gardner, Amit Mehta, Chad Frederiksen, John Hasson, Nickycakes – who are the healthier minority among the affiliate majority).

All proceeds from the event go to charity, which will include the National Breast Cancer Foundation. It’ll be a fun event for sure, though I’m hoping Shawn will give more details. Maybe this year, we’ll see Heather in her bikini at the Rio pool taking on all challengers?

Shawn Collins on his preferred mode of transport

Affiliate Summit West 2009 will be from Jan 11-13 in Las Vegas at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino.

Get your tickets early to avoid disappointment.

Tip: Use promo code ASW09WHOISAW to save 10% off any type of pass

It’s important to look at long-term strategies to get your business on a solid foundation. That is, if you don’t want to find yourself scrambling from one rock to another, as your “empire” sinks into the sand.

Let’s look at some ways to build up personal credibility, especially in the vastness of cyberspace, where a billion websites are calling out for attention.

Here are some essentials that every website should possess:

• Background and Biographical information

At the least, you need an “About” or “About Me”, “About Us” or “About Andrew” / “About (insert your name)”. And having text like “This is an example of a WordPress Page” doesn’t count either.

People want to read and possibly do business with people they know. And “knowing” goes beyond a run-of-the-mill “XYZ Inc is a leading Fortune 500, Inc Hot 100 Tech Startup”.

Pfft. These awards carry some weight, but if you take a second to think about some of the leading tech companies like Dell, Apple, Microsoft, the names Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs come to mind. Personalization if not just a “strategy”, it should be the cornerstone of your success if you want to succeed online.

Going beyond a mention of yourself the person, going a little deeper to include biographical information, adds color and builds stickiness, especially if your audience identifies with you. Whether you were a pump station attendant, McDonald’s French Fry Specialist or an Air Traffic Controller. The “personal cred” factor can be one of the key factors in determing your conversion rate, more so than having the BBB or TrustE logos on your site.

• Photographs/Images

Yes, we’ve seen blogs containing only text (especially if the content has been lifted from somewhere else and pasted verbatim on the site). These can succeed, although adding images and video gives a huge advantage to those who put in the effort to make their blog or website go the multimedia route.

Some good examples include SuperAffiliateMindset’s Amit Mehta:

Scott Jangro’s Jangro.com

Shawn Collin’s AffiliateTip

From a photo montage in his banner. (Left-to-right – Myself, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson)

A picture says a thousand words. If you have videos, I’d expect they’d say 100,000 words.

If you haven’t already gone the multimedia route, it could bring your business to the next level.

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If you have a takeaway from this, it’s not that adding “stuff” to your blog or website is going to bring some magic dust with it. However, given that the internet is constantly expanding, going the personal route or looking inward may seem contradictory. If you try it out however, you may just discover that it pays big dividends.

Going through the various topics, it’s easy to add more tools to your marketing arsenal. At the same time, it will be prudent to avoid falling into the “one trick pony” pitfall.

What does this pitfall involve? Given that the content comes from some of the brightest lights in the internet industry?

Falling into the trap of seeing and then believing that a buzz technology, whether it’s twitter, seesmic, SEOQuake, or some other keyword, analytics or social media tool is going to transform your business.

Is one technology, or a handful of technologies or “tricks” going to transform your business? I think not.

It may be because the bulk of internet marketers are solopreneurs (working through a sole proprietorship structure) that leads to this form of opportunistic thinking.

Granted revenue and more importantly, profits are going to be the lifeblood when you’re starting out as a solo operation. Growing beyond this stage requires visionary thinking and a long term gameplan.

This may mean forgoing some opportunistic quick cash opportunities (like setting up and launching a keyword campaign based around “Michael Phelps”, “Michael Phelps olympics”) because even though this might make you some quick cash, it will take you away from building your core business.

Having a business plan, outlining your goals, area of focus and defining your business activities will give you greater leverage and maximize your chances of achieving the goals you’ve set.

This ties in to a conversation I had earlier this week with Israel-based marketer Andrea Yager about the goals of marketing and how you can best focus your efforts to get what you want out of this business.

Stay tuned for this week’s edition of the Friday Podcast.

Because you are able to broadcast your message across multiple platforms and multiple social networks, you can reach a huge number of people in a very short time.

A recent incident (nowhere near conclusion now) bears this out.

Jim Kukral’s TwitterMeThis social adventure.

At the recent Affiliate Summit West in Vegas 2008: Andrew Wee, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson

About a week ago, Jim published a blog post “Twitter Marketing Experiment – TwitterMeThis” where he’s pay $5 to the winner of a trivia game played on the Twitter micro-blogging (similar to SMS text messages) platform.

Shortly after, the topic was discussed on Geekcast, Jim posts a follow up about “social media being bullshit” and Sam posted a response and Shawn follows up with a sequence of 3 posts: one, two and three. In between there’s a discussion on TrishaLynâ€s blog that Jim might not continue with the Geekcasts.

But Iâ€m not so keen to talk about the  discussion as to look at how it took place.

Far beyond a one-to-one email exchange, the issue has escalated to the point of seeming disagreement and the potential departure of Jim from the Geekcast team.

In the non-social media world, it would have just remained a private exchange of emails.

Within the social media context, the communication trail has gone through several blogs (many of which are highly trafficked), and re-syndicated or referred to by other blogs.

It has also been twittered about (with many of the protagonists in this exchange having followers in the high hundreds.

Add to this the number of Youtube and other video responses being generated, and you can see that a minor disagreement has blown up to probably most of the affiliate industry knowing or at least hearing about this.

If you factor in the fact that Iâ€m halfway around the world, reading and blogging about this at 4am, youâ€ll see that social media is pervasive and goes viral instantly. Forget “tell-a-friend” the news is delivered as soon as you type “twitter” or “youtube” into your address bar.

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What are the implications for social marketers?

• Awareness: Given the fact that most marketers will be reading words on their screen or facing a videocam, itâ€s easy to forget that thereâ€s another person at the other end of the computer. You can make friendships really easily on the internet, you can similarly disagree, argue and experience flare-ups with your friends too.
• The meaning is not always clear: Obviously nothing will communicate your point as well as a face-to-face meeting. Itâ€s hard to tell if someone is being serious or theyâ€re just joking around when they say they are upset with you. You could think theyâ€re joking around, when in fact they could be seriously upset at the other end.
• Itâ€s still the “undiscovered country”: Yes, we know how to use these new fangled technologies, but I donâ€t think we fully understand the social implications and more importantly the social consequences of social media yet. Sociologists have been study cultures for the last 100 years since the “father of sociology” Auguste Compte founded the field. Now what happens when you happens when you add the ability to instantaneously alert thousands, if not hundred of thousands of people with a single video, blog post or twit?

I think anyone whoâ€s read the documentation, FAQs and tutorial videos will be able to use the social media out there pretty easily.

But to be able to use such channels effectively and at the same time, responsibly, is another matter.

As Marvel Comics founder and creator of Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer, Stan Lee coined the phrase, “With great power there must also come – – great responsibility!“

In the midst of shuffling paper around for hours and hours in my office (a real joy), I’ve been listening to episodes of Geekcast.

What I like about Geekcast’s easygoing, conversational banter between Shawn Collins, Lisa Picarille, Jim Kukral and Sam Harrelson is that it’s pretty stream-of-consciousness and more shoot-from-the-hip compared to a more produced program like Lisa and Shawn’s Affiliate Thing or Linda Woods’ Affiliate Marketing Insider.

It’s like talk radio for the internet marketer, and goes beyond the affiliate marketing/affiliate management/blogging/social media borders to cover all things “geeky”.

In the latest episode Web 2.0 is the Devil, (yes, it’s still a dirty word) – it’s interesting to hear about the dirty word beyond it’s traffic and monetization implications to get into the guts of the zeitgeist or spirit of social media.

As Lisa mentions, how do you separate your twitter stream and create a divide between the public and personal messages – how do you create twits that your boss or employees or clients can’t access?

It kinda reminds me of the early days of email, before email folders where everything sat in one massive “inbox”.

Right now, social media is still at it’s rudimentary “1.0” stage, where everything is dumped into one huge social channel.

You can follow Scott Jangro’s post and pull up extra commands to try to manage your twitter stream.

Or follow his advice to un-follow people and just follow the ones you like.

On another note, Facebook has create a provision for “limited profiles” where you can selectively adjust your Facebook profile so your cell phone, email address, mailing address don’t show to people whom you’ve just met.

But back to twitter…

How do you filter your updates (AKA “content”).

Do you create a “Fake Steve Jobs” or “Private Lisa” persona and have friends subscribe to that?

But it would show up on their list of “Following” users – unless the people you are following could be set to “invisible” or “private” which kinda defeats the whole point of social marketing, isn’t it?

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Some advocates talk about curating (AKA moderating or censoring) the web.

But if you’re going to impose formal controls over the web, does that mean the “social web” becomes less “social” and more “formal”?

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These discussions may not seem to have a direct impact on your internet marketing business at the moment, but the intangible mechanics are sure to have a very real impact on your bottomline in the longterm.

Be sure to tune in to the Friday Podcast tomorrow, when I nail Sam Harrelson down on concepts you need to incorporate in your social media efforts. 

Or the opposite scenario “no one” is doing it, so you should be the first.

I have been downloading and listening fairly religiously to the Geekcast podcasts (one of the Geeksters Shawn Collins mentioned that the new episodes come out every Tuesday) and watching Gary Vaynerchuk’s video posts.

So the $1m question is if you like this audio and video content, should you also jump on the metaphorical bandwagon and fire up your Flip camera too?

Here’s where I might differ from some of the others – there’s 2 elements to communication – there’s form (whether you write something on a sheet of paper, take a photo, do a blog post, shoot a video) and there’s function (AKA content) – the meaning behind your message.

In the rock-paper-scissors equation of multimedia…

• graphics trump text-alone (a picture says a thousand words?)
• audio trumps graphics (usually)
• and video trumps static images and audio, right?

In most cases, if you’re judging the value of communication (whether it’s a blog post, a forum post), on the FORM alone, that might be true.

But once you add the function/content equation into it,  I think Content > Form.

I’ve listened to scratchy MP3 files remastered from decaying audio cassette tapes (remember what those are?) to get some information which I’ve then been able to apply in my business or in my personal life.

You might’ve had the experience of walking in a crummy used bookstore and picked up a crumbling ragged old book (rare and out-of-print to boot), and might’ve picked up some useful information.

They say that “knowledge is power” – I don’t think that quite works, rather “applied knowledge is power”

Notice the “container” in which the information came in doesn’t play into the equation.

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Applying this to the audio/video channels and especially to social media – providing value to your consumers is going to be key to your survival in the long-term.

Building on business fundamentals and borrowing from some of the dubious PR spin out there, creating a “unique user experience” can and does provide some novelty value (even if it’s something as unique as the Naked News).

But if you want longevity, you MUST have a reason beyond “nobody/everybody is also doing a podcast or video blog”

Bottomline: the last man (or woman) standing at the end of the day is going to be the one who bears in mind the saying “it’s about the content, stupid.“

So having eaten my lunch while MythBusters was playing on Discovery, I finally opened up the box containing my new MacBook 2.1 Ghz machine (a freebie bundled together with my new 10mbps DSL plan).

While Jamie and Adam are firing machine guns into the side on a car on the screen, I’m pulling the polycarbonate-sheathed laptop out of the box.

First reaction: This thing is pretty heavy compared to my Fujitsu Lifebook ultra-portable.

Second reaction: The graphics are really pretty (I can see why Sam Harrelson and Shawn Collins get into their Asus eee/Apple/Dell Vostro bickering matches)

Third reaction: I don’t quite like the tactile feel of the keyboard. The keys don’t have the “sink” of a traditional keyboard (but that could be easily remedied with a regular-sized USB keyboard). I am just wondering why the Apple developers don’t include the “double tap” on the touchpad simulating a mouse click – that would greatly enhance productivity.

Fourth reaction: I’m not too certain what the Mac equivalents of “control-a”, “control-c” and “control-v” are on the Mac. I think it’s the “open Apple” button.

My first “proper” computer ever was an Apple ][e and I spent 3 years as a desktop production editor working on Apple Quadras in the early 1990s, so I think I’ll be able to make the transition.

I’m still mulling over Geordie Carswell’s advice to ditch the default 1GB of ram and go for the 4GB max.

The MacBook seems to have a proprietary interface for connecting an external monitor, so I still have to figure that one out.

And yes, the absence of a mouse is sorely missed.

As far as I’m aware, Google AdWords Editor does not run on OS X, unless you’re running Basecamp or Parallels or some other cross-platform…It’ll all have to wait till tax season is over and I’ll have time to fiddle with it.

The iSight built-in webcam seems to take pretty killer pictures though…

At times like this, I’m glad that my skype contact list is filled with a host of Apple geeks.

More updates after April 15th.

If you are a marketer are not going to where your leads/prospects/customers are coming from or going to, you could be putting yourself out of their traffic loop, and ultimately the monetization loop.

If you are a merchant or affiliate and primarily using the text channel – articles, blogs, social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and even text ads on Google AdWords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing, are you leaving yourself out of the traffic loop if your best prospects are walking around consuming their media on iPods?

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Here’s a brief rundown of my media consumption:

Text: – newspaper, magazines, books, PDFs, text blogs, email -  I am usually sitting in front of my desk, in front of my computer when consuming text-based information. A large part of it has to do with being tethered to my computer.

Even though I have a laptop (actually 2 now…) and there’re a number of Wi-Fi zones around, and even though I have an Apple Touch, I haven’t inculcated the habit of accessing the Internet while I’m away.

I guess I could Twitter while I’m in a bookstore or just walking around the mall, but it’s just not been a priority.

Maybe if I was a lifecaster (a la Truman Show) like Justin “iJustine” Ezarik, ubiquitious internet access would be a boom (Sam Harrelson AKA “Minister of Social Media” and I had a great discussion about the “cloud” for this week’s upcoming Friday Podcast).

But I’m not, so you might not see as many twits or the 4-5 blog posts you’d notice from the “ProBloggers” out there.

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Audio: Given that I’m primarily a visual person, the audio channel is something relatively new to me because I find I don’t process information as easily when it’s audio-based, rather than visual-based and printed in a book or can be viewed on-screen.

I have started listening to audio though, like the Shawn Collins-Jim Kukral-Sam Harrelson-Lisa Picarille Geekcasts (thanks for the mentions of “WhoIsAndrewWee” on the show, guys!).

But audio is not a “dedicated” medium for me – I’m usually clearing email, sort out files, cleaning my desk, checking my snail mail, sorting out paperwork while the audio is playing in the background.

I guess I have developed my awareness to the extent of being able to note down URLs, copy them onto a piece of paper and checking them out later.

The one great thing about audio is that it’s very much tied to a portable device – whether it’s an iPod, an iPhone, a smartphone or PDA with MP3 playback capability.

If you aren’t maximizing your downtime, by loading up on your knowledge -  you could very well be idling yourself into irrelevance.

Whether you’re driving, working out, or just walking to the store, I think that downtime could be easily translated into some productive “uptime”

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Video: Probably the next best thing to physically being at an event or spending time with someone is being able to catch them on video.

The affiliate blogosphere has been abuzz with why more marketers aren’t already using more video in their marketing efforts.

In my opinion, it takes time to put out a frequently updated product like Jim Kukral’s The Daily Flip. – At least an hour goes into the conceptualization, shooting, editing and posting of your video (even if it’s a 5-10 minute segment).

Figuring the “video stuff” out poses a technology-based barrier to entry from having master software that isn’t the most user friendly, to being able to work out the mechanics of streaming.

The other barrier in my mind is that the search engines are still at the rudimentary level of indexing such videos. So if you were there at the early days of meta tag and keyword tag stuffing to get ranked in the search engines, you could try out similar shenanigans with tag stuffing with videos too. (I don’t think you’d do much good for your reputation though…).

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What will it take for the Internet to go boldly beyond text to embrace audio and eventually video?

If we progress beyond DSL and cable modem-based broadband technologies to Fiber-to-the-Home where 1000 mbps speeds are a very real possibility.

Is 2008 going to be the year that video kills the tv star?

It’ll be interesting to see, but one thing’s for certain, if you aren’t already going to where your leads and prospect are, you could very well be left in the dust.

And we also talk shop about how networks can up their game.

Our discussion built on a number of points raised in Shawn’s AffStat 2008 report in which 200 affiliate managers were surveyed and disclosed information about the industry. It was certainly nothing short of an eye-opening experience.

Check out the Friday Podcast:

Filesize: 13 MB | Duration: 33 mins

And the AffStat 2008 report.