Tag Archives: social-media

How To Succeed At The Social Media Love Dance

You can’t escape social networks or social channels even if you tried to. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Orkut, Bebo, LinkedIn – give access channels for strangers to meet and attempt to become your friends.

As a marketer, social networks or web 2.0 networks and services give you an opportunity to reach out to potential customers at significantly lower costs compared to search engine optimization or paid advertising.

In my opinion there’s greater finesse involved, because if there are another 100 marketers using the same channel to reach out the the person, you have to fight to gain the person’s attention, even as they are being courted by 100 other suitors.

So the $64,000 question is how do you get someone’s attention without becoming annoying.

Can you painlessly win the social media love dance, without getting your heart (and sales conversion) broken?

Here’s an example of what I mean:

My facebook “friend add” request queue currently numbers in the 450+ range.

How do I decide if I approve a friend request?

First step, I look to see if we’ve friends in common.

Second, who are those friend? Casual acquaintances, close friends? Business partners?

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If there’s a personal note, it could gain a couple more bonus points…or be a major deal killer.

A reason like “I saw you on the network and I want to grow my friends list. Please add me” works well if you’re building a friendship profile, or looking for strangers to chat up on an instant messengers or IRC. It doesn’t work as well otherwise.

Another poor reason “I see you’re in affiliate marketing. Let’s be friends”.

Erm, my blog is listed there. I have videos up. Would it be too much to take a look at what I do, and invest a minimal amount of time and effort to find out more about me. And then decide if you want to be my friend?

The analogy would be, if you wanted to expand your circle of friends, would you find out more about someone, or would you go out in the street and randomly start talking to strangers?

I can’t say that talking to strangers might not yield results, but I’m fairly sure the hit rate is going to be significantly lower.

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So you’ve made it past the velvet rope, now what?

The love dance doesn’t Continue reading →

Friday Podcast: CPA Marketing with Market Leverage’s Mike Jenkins

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Florida-based CPA network Market Leverage has generated a fair amount of buzz with it’s Market Leverage TV video broadcasts and recent t-shirt campaigns and “care package” campaigns targeted at some of the most popular bloggers in the affiliate space, including John Chow, Shoemoney, Amit Mehta, Zac Johnson, Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman, Chad Fredericksen, Ian Fernando, Kim Rowley and numerous others.

Market Leverage ranks as one of the networks which effectively uses its marketing and branding budget to devastating effect. By contrast, I work with several networks with great affiliates managers, and one corp comm/PR person who isn’t really empowered to do much and/or doesn’t have any real budget to work with.

As networks see affiliate acquisition as part of the affiliate management success formula, doubtless there’ll be more resources channeled towards building a quality affiliate base.

I appreciated Market Leverage’s Digital Media Relations specialist Debby Phillips arranging a discussion with Market Leverage’s founder and CEO Mike Jenkins.

Mike’s certainly savvier than the average network owner (who’s typically a successful affiliate marketer turned network owner). Conducting some research, I’ve found that Mike has been involved in the business management aspects for a number of pretty large listed firms too.

I especially like how he’s constructed a holistic business ecosystem under his PrecisionPlayMedia group – with 3 components – DigitalLeads (an in-house offer production/packaging subsidiary), Market Leverage (the CPA network arm) and InboxBeyond (an email publishing arm) – which is how the top tier CPA networks structure their business.

During the discussion, we also touched on, but haven’t fully resolved the issue of whether the community-building /relationship-building approaches of social marketing via blogs,video will eventually clash head-on with the current incarnation of affiliate marketing, with the mostly shorter emphasis on one-off lead acquisition payout.

It’ll also be interesting to track Market Leverage’s upcoming announcements in the next 2-3 months.

Check out the Friday Podcast below:

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For sign up as an affiliate, visit:

–> Market Leverage

Can Affiliate Marketing Play Nice With Web 2.0?

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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.

Can Microsoft Get Its Social Media Game Together?

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In the aftermath of an aborted takeover of Yahoo!, Microsoft continues to remain the 800 lb gorilla in the tech industry. The question is where does it go from here?

There’s still talk about Microsoft working with Yahoo! on a collaboration for its search services, but really to leapfrog search engine leader Google, requires a paradigm shift. One possible avenue? The social media game.

Witness the fact that Google hasn’t done much with Blogspot/blogger in the last couple of years.
Services like Google’s Blog Search seemed like a half-hearted implementation.

That’s not to say that Microsoft and Yahoo! are exactly leading the field either.
The Web 2.0 space is still littered with their dying or dead blog services and communities.
A search at Microsoft’s Social Computing Group shows a number of interesting projects, but none really earth shattering to shift the field.

A couple of years ago, Microsoft spun off its own social network Wallop, to fanfare from Mashable and TechCrunch.
So what happened?

For sure, “cloud computing” still seems a distant reality, hobbled by a lack of compelling applications (in contrast, the Japanese with NTT Docomo’s I-Mode service do just about everything with their 3G phones which fold origami-like into small objects of art. Elsewhere in the world, cell phone users rejoice when they get restaurant recommendations or proximity locaters on their phones…).

It could be a good couple of years till Continue reading →

Social Media Still Needs To Grow Up…Some Possible Fixes…

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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?

With Twitter, I suspect it’s the Continue reading →