Posts Tagged ‘social-marketing’
I just had a great discussion with Market Leverage founder and CEO Mike Jenkins about developments in the affiliate marketing industry.
Market Leverage is taking the lead when it comes to relationship building and branding with measures like it’s care package campaign to the top affiliate bloggers, and initiatives like Market Leverage TV. Kudos to Mike and his team for getting on the radar with innovative social marketing strategies.
In the course of our discussion, I was wondering — Will affiliate marketing come to blows with social marketing and social media?
From my discussion with affiliate managers, it seems that the majority of affiliate marketers are only interested in the one-time pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale commission structures. Ask them about revenue share or continuity (eg: subscription/membership) type payouts and they aren’t as keen.
With some bizop offers paying out $100-120 per lead or sale, this could trigger the “quick cash” impulse among some affiliates.
On the other hand, savvy merchants and advertisers would’ve grasped the subtleties of lead generation, building up an leads database and reselling the data or marketing offers to that database, and in many scenarios employing both techniques.
In this case, rev share, especially for a CPA-based network will be a moot point.
This is the business model for “affiliate marketing 1.0” if you want to apply a label to it.
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With social marketing and its technologies like video, social networking, blogging, forums, etc, the emphasis is on building the relationship, forming a community, focusing on the long-term – pretty much a complete opposite to “affiliate marketing 1.0”.
Sure you could just take the tech aspects of social media – the viral marketing, the video and audio which massively increase conversions and leave the relationship benefits at the door. But does that strip social marketing of some of its inherent benefits? Do merely become an updated version of “social engineering” as practised by Kevin Mitnick and others?
It’ll be interesting to see how these initiatives pan out.
Tune in to the Friday Podcast tomorrow to check out the interview with Market Leverage founder Mike Jenkins.
As top affiliate marketer Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project moves into week 3, there’ve been a number of great guests who’ve presented and will be presented in the series.
First off, the site has undergone a design revamp:
Looking very sharp.
Yesterday (Monday), my buddy Amit Mehta presented his series of Pay-Per-Click strategies – the slides and recorded presentation are available for download.
Today, SEO specialist Aaron Wall will be presenting SEO and linking strategies.
It looks like the Black Ink Project will get many new affiliates off to a flying start.
On Friday, I’ll be presenting a session on social marketing strategies and building your online brand.
If you don’t already have access to this quality training, you should register at:
–> The Black Ink Project
One of the strength and at the same time, weaknesses of social media is it’s social nature.
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 TrishaLyn’s blog that Jim might not continue with the Geekcasts.
But I’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 (more…)
This week I got the recently nominated “Minister for Social Media” (yes, he drinks beer and curses…sorry, Jangro) Sam Harrelson on skype, and we chatted about the social media scene.
It’s the “thin client” computing discussion which Sam was refering to at the tailend of Geekcast Episode 13. (you knowyou’ve been listening to a lot of Geekcasts, when you’re typing “http://geekcast.fm/archives/category/geekcast/” into the browser address bar – bookmarks are overrated anyway…)
Besides having Sam do a rundown on his myriad of blogs/websites, we also talked about sci-fi, his new startup Big Idea Agency (the site design seems to change every couple of days, and viewing the page source sometimes shows some weird/arcane trivia).
Yes, there’s lots of social goodness ahead (together with a definition of “cloud computing”).
Check out the Friday Podcast below:
31.5 MB | 1 Hour 16 Mins
If you’ve been following the MyBlogLog blog and read the entry on the latest changes, you’d notice that the interface has undergone a number of changes:
With the change, MyBlogLog has moved from being a blog aggregator to being a Web 2.0 content aggregator of sorts. It’s supposed to be able to pull in updates from twitter, myspace, jaiku, flikr, linkedin, etc (a total of 43 services) and present them in a “New With Me” tab.
Oh yeah…where all the information used to (more…)
This week I had an opportunity to discuss the power of networking at live events with Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins.
Shawn Collins (left) with new Affiliate Summit intern Jack Collins
Shawn is one of the most experienced and friendliest contacts I have made since getting involved in affiliate marketing and I appreciate the fact that he’s a friend whom I consult over IM and through the email.
It was great to hear how Shawn got started in affiliate marketing in 1997 as an affiliate for Amazon, and how he’s progressed to founding the Affiliate Summit seminar/tradeshow with Missy Ward, manages the Affiliate Tip blog, Authored “Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants”, his annual AffStat report, the weekly Affiliate Thing weekly podcast co-hosted with Revenue magazine editor Lisa Picarille, an Affiliate Manager forum and probably 100 other projects, including one which will be launched soon.
Here’re some of the topics we discussed:
- How to get value out of attending seminars and events (as opposed to staying home and reading blogs and forums)
- Important things you should do BEFORE and AFTER attending an event
- How to catch all the conferences free
- How to gain an unfair networking advantage at ASW
- How to get free consulting from industry veterans and experts at the event
The podcast can be accessed below:
46 mins 36 secs : 22 mb
Affiliate Summit West is from Feb 24-26 at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas. Last year the tickets ran out and scalpers were having a field day on eBay.
And Shawn has given a special Affiliate Summit coupon code for my blog readers “ANDREW10” which will give you a 10% discount off your tickets.
Here’s the registration link: Affiliate Summit West.
Get your tickets early to avoid disappointment, and if you’re headed for ASW, I look forward to seeing you there.
