Remember…

• LonelyGirl15? (answer)
• Ricky Martin? (answer)

Just the other night, I got the answer…Ricky who?

Exactly!

If you’re using the social web, or mass media (the bigger subset which social media is a part of), you’re subject to constantly being in the spotlight and branding and promoting yourself to stay in the spotlight and create mindshare and ultimately marketshare.

I was reading Ricky’s wiki entry and his life seems to stop in 2006 with an 8 month concert tour ending abruptly due to a lack of advertising.

So in lieu of constantly paying for advertising costs if you’re using Pay-Per-Click traffic, social marketers will instead be banking in their social cachet.

There’s a thread going Stephanie Agresta’s blog, that after “Video killed the radio star” that the “YouTube will kill the Video star“.

Which is one of the phenoms you’ll see going around that Internet stars like Winelibrary TV (guru is a bad word in my book) expert Gary Vay-Ner-Chuk! and iJustine AKA Justine Ezarik and Lisa Nova (Lisa parlayed a series of spoofs on YouTube into appearing on MadTV)

The buzz exists as long as you continue to build your brand and social momentum, else you could end up as the next LonelyGirl or LonelyGuy.

In the meantime, enjoy Lisa Nova’s re-enactment of 300!

What started this off was Revenue editor-in-chief’s post about video blogging and wondering why the majority of video bloggers seem to be male.

Is it an issue of looks? Or vanity?

Internet Geek Girl Stephanie Agresta weighed in:





Shedding some insight was Shawn with some disturbingly profound thoughts…

I was pleasantly surprised to see Missy Ward talk about burning her vanity bra…

Click To Play

And finally Sam “Mountain Man” Harrelson weighed in with some surprisingly philosophical advice.

And here’s the answer to the “Want to be a successful video blogger” question

…Get a fur-covered face.

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On a more serious note, I had a great discussion with Shawn about trends in the affiliate marketing industry and how affiliate networks and merchants can up their affiliate marketing game. Tune in for this week’s edition of Friday Podcast. (to be published on Friday).

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.

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Keep an eye out for the Friday Podcast with Rachel Honoway tomorrow – there’re some goodies in store.

At Affiliate Summit West with ASW co-founders Shawn Collins and Missy Ward

If it was your first Affiliate Summit or you would like to get more out of your trip, here’re my suggestions:

• Follow Up

Yes, you can mass mail all the people you met, but social marketing/conversational marketing is what’s going to give you an edge in building relationships and bringing your business to the next level. Include a personal note, talk about winning that $15,000 top prize at the slot machines at 3am, or downing round-after-round of shots at the Ghost Bar. People connect best with those they have a personal connection with.

For more tips check out “Internet Geek Girl” Stephanie Agresta’s blog. She’s mentioned she’s really good at the following up part.

Here’re 2 things I’ve learned from my consulting to brick-and-mortar companies, 2 things need to stand out and are probably more important than the sale (whether it’s the sale of a product/service or inking of a service/consulting contract). The pre-sales and the post-sales.

Pre-sales might’ve taken place at your Affiliate Summit booth, or over dinner, or at one of the parties. Post-sales means you continue keeping in touch with your customers/partners even after the project has been kicked off or the product has been delivered.

Is it too soon? Too late?

I’d say that you have a 2-week window to drop people a note after the summit. After 2 weeks, it’s difficult to place a reference.

• Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize

You have a business to run, maybe a day job and a family or significant other to take care of or spend time with. So you need to sort out your business contacts:

Who should you get touch with immediately.

Who should you get in touch with within the next 7 days.

And then there’s everyone else that you follow up with when you have time. Eg. checking your email on your iPhone during the boring bits at a meeting, or while waiting for someone and you’re in a WiFi zone.

• Lessons Learned And Key Takeaways

Yes, it’s not as cool to keep a diary or notebook (the paper-based variety!) anymore, but let’s face it, you’ll forget 50% of what you learned a week later, and 50% of whatever remains a month from now, and so on. Pretty soon, you’ll forget that you were even at the Affiliate Summit!

I keep multiple text files on my computer, labelled:

• PPC-tips.txt
• marketing-pointers.txt
• contact-info.txt
• trial-super-affiliate-exclusives.txt

and so on. If there’s going to be an invite-only launch for a new product or service, I need to keep track of when it starts, how long it’s running for, and most important my account name and password.

If going to a couple of great parties and meeting “celebrities” was the highlight of ASW for you, you’re sure missing out on a lot of good stuff!

• Bringing Home More Bacon!

Typically I come home with a list of 10 new things to test out in my existing campaigns, or new product ideas to test out. This past summit was no different.

By “testing out something new”, it has to be more than adding a new widget that someone mentioned during a session or during a conversation, I’d do a benchmark to see what the results are before testing a new strategy, then I’d test the new strategy.

Going one step further, I’d develop 3 more variations of that idea and test those too. It’d be like a mini multi-variate test if you will. And only after enough data has been collected will I continue testing the two best performing strategies out of the bunch of 5 tests.

Going by past experience, I’ve seen modest increases of 10-20% testing new techniques, with the occasional 50% jump in my results. If that doesn’t already pay for the cost of your trip and room and board and entertainment, I’d be hard pressed to find an alternative.

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To give you an idea of how important attending live events is to my business, I’m already making plans to attend Affiliate Summit East in Boston from August 10-12 later this year.

Here’s what I face each time I click on my “Home” setting on my Facebook profile:

Keep scrolling…

Click on the “more” tab below and keep scrolling…

So getting on Facebook is quite a painful experience.

Being hit by irrelevant application invites, and with Facebook system where multiple people can keep sending you invites to the same app over and over again, and the best part is that you have to deny/ignore each application request one at a time, means you could be spending 15 – 30 minutes each day just getting rid of application requests…

So is this effective social marketing?

Should you still go out and develop a facebook app?

With MySpace, you would get friend-bombed and bulletin-bombed and event-invite bombed before the social network became largely socially irrelevant…unless you were a teenager with iron-like patience or maybe bopping away to your MP3 collection as you were patiently wiping…or maybe accepting every application request that came in…

That’s the one beautiful of a professional network like LinkedIn, aside from some social gamers throwing out irrelevant questions to their network every other day, the pre-screen is largely successful.

With Facebook, I’m thinking that the next Facebook app developer who comes out with the “One Facebook app” – tagline “One Application To Rule Them All” – which could do a global delete of pending application and friend requests, might just emerge the king of the mountain.

The question is, “Mountain of What?”

Social marketers, I’m keen to hear what you’ve to say, maybe Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Wayne Porter (whom I know is addicted to a particular insidious Facebook game…), Stephanie “Internet Geek Girl” Agresta, Robyn “Sleepyblogger” Tippins, Shawn Collins, or if you the reader might like to weigh in, drop a comment below…

Unlike the past Affiliate Summit where I found myself hiking from Harrah’s (which has great prime rib) to Bally’s every morning, I was determined to get lodging at the Rio where the summit will be held.

Having said that, here’s some summit survival tips:

• Take the bus if you have time and like to see the city. It costs about $6 for a 1-way ticket and stops at most of the major hotels. It does take a little time to get around though because it stops at quite a number of hotels.
• Wear comfortable walking shoes as you’ll be pounding the show floor if you’re diligent about meeting merchants and networks (I only got through about 25% of the booths the last time round because I was talking to and got waylaid by people as I was walking around).
• Carry a backpack if you don’t want to be lugging your schwag all over the place. Especially if there’re booths giving out Plasma TVs, Xbox360s and Nintendo WIIs (I think most of us can go out and buy one, it’s just the ultra competitive streaks in every motivated affiliates that comes out when it comes to competitions…)

With that out of the way, and a 15 hour plane ride (I’m taking a direct Singapore-Los Angeles flight on a brand spanking new Airbus A380 this time) ahead, what’s in store at Affiliate Summit?

The fun begins before the event starts.

Anik Singal and his Affiliate Classroom team have organized Affiliate Classroom Live, a 1-day workshop for affiliate managers on Saturday 23 Feb. What’s more it’s free…Places are very limited though, so check out:

–> Anik Singal’s Affiliate Classroom Live

Chase the workshop with Brook Schaaf’s Affiliate Dinner. Expect to see a guest of honor. Expect to see the guest of honor roasted…What fun!

Is Affiliate Dinner a ponzi scheme? Here’s the answer…

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So day 1 of the summit kicks off with the “Affiliate Meet Market” from noon to 6pm. I missed this the last time because of a delayed flight, but I’m arriving a day early to make sure I am able to take part in the meet-and-greet and associated networking.

Here’s the floorplan for the Affiliate Meet Market. (PDF format)

–

Day 2 kicks off with Jason Calacanis’ keynote.

With Jason recently refering to “Affiliate Spam” “polluting” the search engines at the Paris Le Web seminar, you can expect some fireworks during the keynote.

–

One note about the presentations that follow. An overwhelming number of presentation proposals were submitted, with the result that about 4 presentations are simultaneously ongoing during each time slot. In many cases, you have great sessions going on at the same time.

I checked with Shawn and he mentioned that the sessions will be recorded and available for viewing later.

I’d suggest prioritizing your favorite sessions and making a beeline for them. In some cases I can see the majority of the crowd gravitating towards ONE session…

Forewarned is forearmed…

I’ve listed some of the sessions I personally am interested in attending:

As I’ve been doing a number of podcast and vlogging (video blogging) lately, I’m keen to check this session out.

I met Buy.com’s Melissa Salas last Feb at ASW, and she present a pretty great show for Buy.com over at Buy.Tv.
(As of last October, on the BuyTV MySpace page it’s mentioned that “BuyTV was just informed that it has been picked up for local programming via Time Warner, Cox, Charter, DirecTV, Echostar, Dish Network and others – Sunday mornings at 11:30am PST”)

And you have a panel of other video marketing/video blogging folks on the panel.

–

Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds is always a popular presenter, and I’m looking forward to checking out his presentation ahead of his session.

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Day 3 kicks off with an “Ask the Experts” session:

I’m keen to talk to Heather Paulson about her new Paulson Management Group company.

A little later in the day, be sure to check out:

A media panel chaired by Revenue Magazine’s Lisa Picarille. Besides myself, you’ll also see Jim Kukral, Anik Singal and Valerie Stevens on the panel.

In parallel with the media panel is the Super Affiliate panel:

With the likes of Pepperjam’s Kris Jones, John Chow, Zac Johnson and Amit Mehta in attendance.

And if you’re not already torn between two or more sessions, consider that later in the afternoon, you’ll have the ABestWeb panel:

With AbestWeb’s Haiko De Poel, AffiliateCrew’s Chuck Hamrick and Team Loxly’s Loxly AKA Deb Carney in attendance.

In the same time slot you have the social marketing panel:

With a Who’s Who of the blogosphere/social media space, like Sam Harrelson, Tris Hussey, Stephanie Agresta among others.

I would point out more highlights, but my fingers are worn-out from all that typing, so you might like to check out:

–> Affiliate Summit West 2008

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That’s an interesting question and let me do my best to you an interesting answer.

If you read Stephanie Agresta (AKA Internet Geek Girl’s) post “Blogging is not dead (but I am really busy)“, you’d realize that like a lot of popular bloggers (eg. Sam Harrelson, Wayne Porter, Jim Kukral and Co), Steph has reduced the frequency of her “long form” (eg. WordPress blogging), in favor of micro-blogging (eg. Twitter and it’s companions).

So blogging is not “dying” nor will it “die” anytime soon.

The significant issue at hand is to get a grip on your long term business growth.

Are you being overly tactical – looking at the micro level of your business – whether you should set up a squidoo page, a hubpage, a facebook profile, throw up a social community site…

When really you need to be more strategic in nature!

If you need an analogy – strategic or being long term-focused means looking at the forest, and fashioning a master plan.

Being tactical means you’re looking at an individual tree and trying to optimize it. Taking care of the day-to-day. so to speak.

Don’t get me wrong, you NEED to be tactical in nature when you’re going into a new niche and building up your skills, but you shouldn’t be spending your time digging up all the coolest and newest Facebook applications or WordPress plugins at the expense of your business growth.

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If you are serious about bringing your business to the next level, you might instead be looking at:

• Synergistic partnerships to expand the breadth and reach of your products and services.
• Opening new channels and distribution, opening new markets for your existing products.
• Trend forecasting and research and development, to expand the capabilties of your current, to evolve it into a version 2.0 or version 3.0 so you can meet the future head on.

And only once you’ve laid out the blueprints to meet those challenges listed above, yeah, sure, you can fire up the Battleships application on Facebook and start fragging those tactical-thinking marketers into kingdom come…