Year: 2006

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth chats about Microsoft, marketing and open software…

Q: What about growth in adoption rates, any kind of numbers that you can give me?

A:We know now that there are probably at least 8 million [Ubuntu] users….

and later…

On the other hand, what they do want to do is they want customers to feel slightly nervous of Linux. I think Microsoft is certainly sort of becoming a smarter operator into how they interact with Linux and with free software. They spent a lot of time saying it doesn’t exist, it is a toy, it is a cancer, and it is dangerous, and calling it anti-capitalist, and now they seem to be engaging in a much more realistic competitive pragmatic fashion to that problem.

Read this and then read this…

Don’t think Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution) has anything to do with online marketing in general? Wrong. Think of Firefox. The browser was just the beginning of the sea change.

Today is the last day of 2006 and tonight at midnight we’ll pass that spot in space and time in our planet’s revolution around the nearest star which people and places around the earth following the Gregorian Calendar mark as the beginning of a new year.

The calendar that we use to mark this new year is relatively new, dating back just about 450 years and based on the Roman calendar which is about 2200 years old. There are still older calendars, such as the many calendars of ancient Mesopotamia (the Assyrian calendar being my favorite) which are based on lunar cycles. There are numerous other calendars in use by many people on earth today, and this particular coordinate doesn’t mark the beginning of a new year on those.

What most of these calendars share in common is their emphasis on cycles and the implications of a once-dominant agrarian mode of life. We sowed, we reaped, we stored and we celebrated.

This cycle of the year carries over into our own online marketing existence. In most instances, we don’t have to wait an entire season to reap what we’ve sown in our own program’s ad buys, media spends or affiliate programs. In some cases, the ROS (Return on Sow… I just coined that!) happens within hours or days or in the course of a few weeks. Rarely do we have to wait months for the germination or even ripening of the fruits of our work in online marketing.

Back in October of 2004, Steve Rubel wrote the following during the launch of Firefox’s important and monumental ad in the NY Times…

Open source marketing is the future. Need proof? Study how the Mozilla Foundation is building momentum behind Firefox.

Mozilla today launched a community effort to secure enough funds to take out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. The full-page ad will include the names of everyone who supports the campaign along with a message about the benefits/features of the awesome Firefox browser. An individual contribution of $30 will get your name included in the ad ($10 student rate). eWeek has more details.

However, that is not always the case, especially when we consider the seed-to-maturity time that some ideas need for their development and harvest. In some cases, thoughts, ideas or insights that we plant in fertile soil can take years before they are ready to reap.

Perhaps this is the case with the ideas of Cluetrain or even open source marketing. The idea has caught on, web2.0 has given the incentive and platforms such as widgets are allowing for the expression of open source marketing from marketers with Madison Ave budgets to affiliate marketers and merchants working with a small and limited budget.

These are exciting times in the history of messages, conversations, communication, media and marketing.

We may be passing the same point in space and time that we’ve passed over and over for the last four billion years, but something revolutionary is happening in our short lived and young species…

We are combining new technologies, new educational models, new sociological models, new psychological insights and a deeper understanding of how we communicate with each other (verbally, graphically or silently) as animals… and turning that mash into something different.

I don’t know what that “different” thing is yet, but it has something to do with open source marketing, technologies, lifestyles and experiences.

My favorite example? Beer (yes, I am brewing some… I’ll send samples on request… Cost Per Beer?). Ponder the history.

Here’s an interesting “8 Part List” from collaborativemarketing.com to ponder as we come closer to that point in our planet’s revolution around the nearest star…

These strategies are as sophisticated as the new markets themselves but a few principles are emerging.

1. BACK TO THE SOURCE Consumers are no longer happy to sit back and be fed a brand and its values. They want to interact with the ‘brand source’ in the same way that Linux programmers want to get their hands on the programming source code. That means giving consumers access to the brand and inviting them to co-create on branded projects. Open Source marketeers understand this and make it easy for customers to get involved with a brand and affect its direction, maybe even its values.

2. SPOT BRAND FANS The new breed recognise there is no point in ‘demanding back the source material’ because it is well and truly out there — in the public domain. And it’s not coming back. In fact, they look to put the brand source materials in the hands of the consumers, especially brand fans like George Masters. Then they sit back and watch the fireworks as communities create and innovate in ways that enlarge and enrich the community.

3. BE A BRAND HOST They know that that brand guardians are no longer relevant to the marketplace and that brand hosts are more in tune with the times. Today’s consumer wants to interact with big, exciting, sexy brands, but on their own terms. Brands can host the party and try and make it attractive to consumers but they must realise that the new consumer has a full diary and plenty of suitors. marketplaceWelcome_1 and that brand hosts are more in tune with the times.

4. ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME? The voice of the mass markets was a LOUD and BOOMING monologue. Which didn’t leave a lot of time to listen to anyone. Open Source communities are all about conversation and dialogue. Open Source Marketing means listening really closely to the rumours and whispers that bring the new marketplace alive.

5. GET REAL (LIKE SCOBLE) Authenticity is one of the most valuable currencies in the transparent marketplace. So human, friendly voices (like Robert Scoble) are particularly effective. Corporate speak and PR flack is just ignored. And it’s no good just pretending. YOU WILL GET RUMBLED. This can be a difficult leap of faith for companies who have been used their brands like shields, to keep the world at bay.

6. YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE CLEVERER THAN YOU Open Source marketeers understand that their customers are clever, cleverer than themselves and their agencies. So they try and tap into this intelligence to help grow their brands. By the way, this includes the obssessive customers who make a racket about every last product detail or development and constantly get in touch with leftfield ideas. They are probably the most valuable.

7. LET GO Open source marketeers understand, most importantly, that people are now in control of the brands that for so long have been wrapped up and locked in corporate safes. Brands are no longer proprietary and companies need to adapt to that reality. There’s no point in calling in the lawyers to try and change things back. The world has moved on.

8. OPEN MINDS Open Source marketeers also know this new environment is not as dangerous as it sounds. They know the greatest barriers are the mental ones built up during the reign of mass marketing and TV.

By setting some rough parameters and then challenging consumers to get involved, or co-create, they are already seeing some fantastic results.

Here’s to a happy revolution!

Here’s the last part of our series (unless you’d like a particular service/platform covered)… how are merchants/marketers/affiliates using or not using Wikipedia?

Wikipedia has received tremendous press and is appearing at the top of organic search engine results on every platform for most topics.

Aside from the “Affiliate Marketing” entry, I’ve not been able to find much use, or attempted use, of Wikipedia by affiliate marketers. The affiliate networks do have entries, but they are rather short. ShareASale has no entry yet, and I’ve not been able to find any CPA network entry, either.

One exception is Jeff Molander’s The Partner Maker’s entry.

So, is there a place for affiliate marketing to make use of Wikipedia as other flavors of online marketing have done? For example, see the web2.0 chat client Meebo entry and compare it to the rather paltry CJ entry. There is a vast difference in the intended audience.

Is there a way to tastefully and ethically use Wikipedia to promote an affiliate program? With the exception of FatWallet’s entry, no program has attempted to take on this challenge.

There’s not even an entry on ABestWeb, which is thought of as the most relationship based community in affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is said to be based on the leveraging of relationships. What does it say about the relationships and communities we’ve created when even the most recognizable brand in the industry has such a skinny entry on the world’s repository of knowledge?

Since this is the last of our web2.0/affiliate marketing campaigns, I thought I’d include a link to this informative post from Dion Hinchcliffe.

Everyone’s blogging.

But, how are merchants and affiliates utilizing RSS to improve their programs?

Is RSS a viable channel of commerce communication or just Web2.0 hype?

I’ve been schooled. Asa Dotzler (community coordinator of many Mozilla Foundation projects including Bugzilla, the Quality Assurance Program, co-founder of Spread Firefox and fellow lover of astronomy) and I have been trading comments here on CPN regarding the FF browser and it’s community.

I’ve included the initial part of the post which stirred the conversation and the string of comments that followed.

As an aside, also see Firefox co-founder Blake Ross’ blog entry on why he distrusts Google in their “tips” on search results…

AdventureQuest, from Artix Entertainment, is a four year old flash based online role playing platform hoping to sustain a community in an already crowded field dominated by World of Warcraft.

However, AdventureQuest has taken a unique twist with its plans to enroll members by signing up with the affiliate management company Partnercentric and starting a program this month…

Gamers and business owners alike will all be excited to hear that there is now a FIRST EVER affiliate program for a Massively Single Player Role Playing Game (MSPRPG). That’s right, you can now earn up to 50% for all upgraded customers for Artix Entertainment’s AdventureQuest and DragonFable RPG titles.

The affiliate program is being run on DirectTrack and starts with a 30% payout for new sign-ups but can tier up to 50%. Play is free unless the member wants to upgrade to “Guardian” status within the game, which costs a one time payment of $19.95.

Program manager Dan Fink of Partnercentric says that the site has had tremendous growth in numbers since creating its affiliate program. Fink was interested in managing and developing the affiliate program for Artix since this would be the first time an online RPG had used affiliate marketing to reach new customers and members.

Being a gamer myself it’s great to see a quality game company like Artix Entertainment bring affiliate marketing to online gaming. Not only can the quality of their work be seen in their game, but also their creative used in the program. We have about 70 different flash creative that are all of high quality design and convert extremely well so far.

I’ve played the game for a few minutes here and there today and it does flow nicely. Granted, it is no WoW, but it is promising to see new online RPG communities seeking out affiiate marketing as a means to increase reach and distribution.

Yes, this is another tagging ring, and yes I’ve used the term “meme” (apologies to Shawn Collins and David Lewis).

However, this one came from a blogger I hadn’t yet heard of and supports good causes, so I’ve posted this here.

What if the game of Blog-Tag going around the blogosphere in which bloggers are sharing five things about themselves that relatively few people know, and then tagging five other bloggers to be “it” morphed into bloggers sharing the five charities they believe are most worthy of contribution?

Let’s see if this idea will work. I will start by tagging Stefan Tilkov, Scott Mark, David Heinemeier Hansson and one blogger whom I don’t know (even virtually) but will tag via trackback in hopes that they will consider charity a higher priority over etiquette or other secondary concerns.

Somehow James found me and sent me a trackback to participate, so here are five of the charities and groups that I’ve given time and money to over the last few months. This list will vary for you, since I believe that charity should be as immediate and personal as possible. That’s not always possible (Darfur) but it’s a goal that I strive for.

• Asheville Humane Society
• Asheville Homeless
• Asheville Manna Foodbank
• Heifer.org
• ACLU (no, I’m not joking… I’m a hippie libertarian and card carrying member)
• Carl Sagan Foundation

Instead of “tagging” 5 others, I’ll just put out the idea that anyone who reads CPN is encouraged to consider giving either to their local communities or to their region, to their country, world and the Cosmos in general.

However, there’s a better way to spread worthy meme’s like this rather than through tagging (especially since everyone is sick of the “5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” virus) as I’m sure James knows, and I’m glad to see he’s trying to turn the 5 People thing into something worthwhile. Tagging is wonderful, but it can come across as too forceful. Attack with love and spread good ideas through more subtle means and the payoff for the good causes you’d like to support will be higher. Doing good should be a subversive maneuver hidden away until it germinates. Just my thoughts.

If you haven’t listened to the latest AffiliateThing by Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille, you need to download that now and give a quick listen. There’s some interesting stuff on there for your listening pleasure.

One of the things they hit on are our ongoing posts about affiliate marketing and web2.0 platforms such as Twitter and YouTube.

So, let’s do the obvious and tackle MySpace.

I’m sure you are all familiar with the platform. How does/can affiliate marketing work with MySpace for you? I’d argue that it can’t. I think most affiliate marketers use too much of a “push” mentality to work with MySpace. Have any marketers successfully used MySpace (beyond the site placements) to effectively drive traffic to their site/program?

(BTW, Shawn evidently owns affiliatewidget.com… contribute to costperlove.com to help me buy it from him!)

Michael Arrington is announcing on TechCrunch that PayPerPost is acquiring Performancing, the blog advertising platform.

A number of blogs in the online marketing sector use Performancing (such as Linda Buquet and Steve Rubel among 28,000 others), and I wonder how this will affect or not affect their use, of the Performancing platform.

Is this a complete buy-out or will PayPerPost only be acquiring part of Performancing’s services? Arrington says the Firefox plugin is not being acquired and will be spun-off, but that seems odd to me.
More answers when they come…

Could affiliate marketing, or online marketing for that matter, ever work on a complete open source model?

Or perhaps to frame the question more appropriately…

Could an affiliate marketing network, broker, agency or even publisher ever succeed (yes, I know that’s a subjective term) with an open source model?

The much talked about MyAffiliateProgram v9 platform has landed another large merchant client.  Intuit Inc. has announced that it will use MyAP for its Quicken and QuickBooks affiliate programs.

“Intuit has joined a number of our marquee clients, like Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yamaha, in choosing MYAP to manage their affiliate relationships,” said Todd Farmer, president of KowaBunga!. ”The increasing complexity of affiliate marketing and partnering strategies makes it appealing for companies to find more powerful solutions to manage their affiliate channel.”

MyAP v9 has received a good deal of buzz in the network and hosted solution spheres lately because of its flexibility and ability to offer highly specific an drilled-down stats across various channels.

Will 2007 bring more defections from networks such as CJ or Linkshare towards networks such as Kowabunga or ShareASale?

(I hear Jim K wants a ticket to the WWE Smackdown event at Quicken Arena tonight if anyone has a connection).

Small merchants who rely on channels such as affiliate marketing could possibly be feeling some unwanted side effects of the adoption of IE7 and other web browsers such as Opera in January when Microsoft will begin to use a new verification feature to stop phishing scams.

The problem could be in a new digital certificate that can better verify a site’s legitimacy than the older “SSL padlock” which was readily available for large and small merchants and included a rather simple approval process.

The new system is far more thorough, but because of the way that it works, many small businesses will be excluded. They can still get an SSL certificate, but their sites won’t get the green “safe” bar in IE7 and Opera.

The new platform will be called “EV” which is short of Extended Validation SSL Certificate and includes a lengthy and purposely more difficult approval process in an attempt to stop the rise of scams and phishing sites who can currently obtain SSL certificates.

Here are the draft guidelines (pdf file) which go into exhaustive detail about what certificate authorities must and must not do when issuing EV’s.

To give only a single example, certificate authorities must ensure that the address they are given by the company is its actual place of business. If the CA is unable to verify this using public records, it must send “a reliable individual” on a site visit to the address. The visitor must look for a permanent sign, must note whether the building is a condo, office building, strip mall, etc., look for evidence that ongoing business is taking place at the location, and must take photos of the exterior and the reception area.

Small merchants (especially pertinent to our niche) need to develop a way to deal with such rapid changes to make sure visitors and potential customers to their sites know they are on a “safe site” for purchasing items and giving away private or credit card information. Otherwise, www.jennifersbakedgoods.com (I’m not sure if that’s a real site or not) won’t be able to compete.

One possibility could be a dual or split program where smaller merchants have different amounts of hoops to jump through in order to gain EV status rather than going through the same exhaustive process as Forbes 100 companies. However, such dual programs might allow the phishing sites the CA/Forum is attempting to head off access to certification.

Ars Technica has more here.

Yahoo News has more here.

Scott Jangro has released his Affiliate Blog List project.

It’s part affiliate blog index where you can perhaps discover some new affiliate marketing blogs. It’s part RSS reader where you can see the latest affiliate blog entries all in one place. And it’s part Digg — you can give individual blog entries a boost in the rankings (or the opposite).

The site is impressive in its functionality and simplicity out of the gate, so be sure to visit and subscribe to the feed there. Take the time to pour through some of the entires and vote on them as well.

A social news “Digg-style” ranking system for affiliate blogs is highly needed and Scott has provided a great resource for all of us here.

Maybe the Flaming Lips have it right on their new album…

If you knew all the answers and could give it to the masses?

Would you do it?

No no no no no no are you crazy?

Almost THREE years ago I wrote the following piece about online advertisements, spyware, banners, pops, email and the general state of online and affiliate marketing at the time. I think this is still particularly appropriate for our current place in space and time.  When I wrote this, I’d been in the industry for a while at this point and I was getting particularly upset with the state the of the whole enterprise by this point.

However, I believe in the general mission of online marketing more than anyone and know that affiliate marketing, in particular, has incredible transformational potential for society (at least of the American variety) due to its emphasis and ability to stress relationship.

Three years from now, let’s make sure we can look back on this point in time and space and realize what we have learned.

Here’s the piece…

Try to imagine life without advertisements. At this point, it is ultimately worthless to attempt such a feat. However, the backlash against advertisements has been an ongoing phenomenon well before digital recorders, email filters and pop-stoppers. The advent of the VCR brought the same apocalyptic predictions from advertising analysts. However, these reports of impending doom soon proved baseless. However, products like TiVo, the Federal Do Not Call list (60 million Americans have signed up), and email “junk boxes” (present in 54% of American homes) do present a different sort of challenge to advertisers looking for eyeballs. Can consumers ever filter advertisements out of their life? Ultimately, what do advertisements mean to the mythos of our society?

Andy Warhol took the symbol of the advertisement and was able to express an incredible amount of meaning from common icons of pop culture. Part of Warhol’s genius was his ability to reproduce images that were seemingly so mundane into complicated representations of contemporary life. In Warhol’s works, Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo boxes, Campbell Soup cans and everyday brand images become hieroglyphs (literally translated means “sacred texts”) of contemporary American life. In Warhol’s vision, advertisements serve as an important key to understanding the complex visual nature of pop society.

Public feelings and opinions aside, what fundamental service and meaning do advertisements serve in 21^st century American culture? Are ads contemporary hieroglyphs as Warhol posed, or are they more defined by Dylan’s contention in his 1965 song It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)?:

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

As direct marketers, we’d certainly like to think that Warhol’s canonization of advertisements is more valid than the opinions of those who would love to see their demise, whether on email, tv or radio. However, returning to the first question posed in this article, imagine a world devoid of advertisements. Certainly, culture as we know it would be radically different.

Advertisements supply a great deal of contextualization, meaning, and dare I say, value to pop-culture. It can be argued that ads actually supply a socialization tool that helps to predict and secure norms within the culture. If it were possible to choose every advertisement that we saw as consumers, or block them entirely how would that affect the social situation held together, in large part, by advertisements?

Good or bad, advertisements have become the sacred scripture of the American dominated global pop culture. In the global culture held together by “market capitalism” the signs of the world’s great religions have been usurped by the Golden Arches and the red and white Coca-Cola bottles. Warhol tapped into this by exposing the sanctification of advertisements in their ability to supply and convey cultural truths, norms and ultimately, definition.

Where is the line to be drawn? Is spyware or adware acceptable forms of advertising? What does “acceptable” mean? Should we be subjected to so much advertising in our daily lives that it fills our memory banks to the brim and spills over? Advertising has always existed. No doubt, it always will. Advertisers have constantly sought the most eyeballs available for the dollar and looked for ways to codify themselves in the normal life of consumers. Post-modern bombardment of the sub-conscious can truly seem like a troubling issue that we as direct marketers and advertisers must face and answer. However, at a certain point, advertisements do fill the gap in our collective need for stabilization and provide social “norms” in a fragmented post-modern society.

As consumers continue to invest more time and money into “ad-blocking” technologies, the question of advertisement’s place among the masses is raised in this new context of direct, targeted and instant marketing. Will the Warhol of the 21^st century proclaim the sacredness of weight-loss or mortgage html email creatives?

Verizon is going to begin allowing the placement of ads on the phones of users…

Beginning early next year, Verizon Wireless will allow placement of banner advertisements on news, weather, sports and other Internet sites that users visit and display on their mobile phones, company executives said.

In terms of online marketing, this is a huge deal. In terms of affiliate marketing, this doesn’t matter…yet.

The main reason has to do with the incredibly high CPM rates that Verizon will probably charge (through a Madison Ave agency probably) for placements. Most companies using the affiliate channel as the main resource for customer acquisition, retention and purchasing won’t notice or care… and for good market reasons.

However, larger merchants who are looking for cost effective ad buys will notice. It’s no secret that the inventory for advertising on the main online hubs is steadily beginning to reach saturation and once that plateau is hit, the market will shift back to where we were in 1998 with a space-seller market of high demand and low supply. Even with blogs, A-Listers and feed readers, most online readers will navigate (pun intended, Jason) towards a collection of hubs in the online sphere. That’s network game theory and it’s highly predictable if you have the tools and time.

Eventually (within the next 15 months), CPA will hop from the online fishtank into the mobile fishtank and begin to gobble up CPM rates and force a needed evaluation of quality placements. We’re certainly not at this point in this early stage of online and mobile marketing, but you still need to have someone evaluating this particular space for your future developments. The same thing could be said of early developments in banners, email, and even search. This game has only been in play for about a decade, so don’t get caught up in the present. Keep an eye on the past and the future as well.

Specifically, affiliate and CPA networks should take notice. No one is making use of the mobile space (yet… until the fabled acquisitions of 2007), but this is going to be lucrative space. If you are a network, get in now.

The Holidays are in full swing here, but I wanted to give you two quality posts to check out if you have any down time this weekend…

Google’s Matt Cutts discusses page view data and defends Yahoo…

I want to come to Yahoo’s defense about something. A recent spate of reports says that Yahoo has been surpassed by various companies in terms of page views. Why is that relatively bogus? Because of Yahoo’s switch to AJAX for its mail. According to Alexa data, 49% of Yahoo visitors go to mail.yahoo.com. Everyone knows that I take Alexa data with a grain of salt, and that 49% fraction may be high, but Yahoo definitely gets a lot of traffic from Yahoo Mail. Yahoo’s new mail system uses AJAX. And how do the metrics companies handle AJAX? Typically, not well.

And Edelman’s Steve Rubel points out that Google is indexing social sites such as Digg in its blog search service.  What does that mean for SEO??  I’d argue it means a great deal…

Despite the gripes about Google Blog Search and its inability to filter out spam, the site has been improving steadily. It now indexes lots of non-news content as long as it is published in a feed.

Don’t these people take a break from writing quality stuff on the Holiday weekends??  More after the eggnog kicks in…

I hope everyone has a fun, happy and warm holiday where ever you are and whatever you are doing.

Marketing is a distinct human endeavor in which we attempt to persuade, either directly or indirectly, others of the valuable nature of some service, product, program or idea that they are not yet aware of or using.  Let’s all promise each other to do marketing right (whatever that means) in the new year.

I’d also like to thank you for making CPN such a success over the last few months. Since launching at the beginning of November we all (you and me) have managed to create a pretty valuable and interesting niche community discussing some of the most important questions we could ponder in the industry.

2007 promises to provide many more additional questions, so I hope you’ll continue to come here for discussion.

I also wanted to give a few shout outs to people who have explicitly made CPN possible over the last few months with their money, time, thoughts, encouragement and links:

• Shawn Collins and Missy Ward of Affiliate Summit: (thanks for the sponsorship and kind words early on!)
• Wayne Porter: you rock
• Jim Kukral: I owe you about a dozen beers in Vegas – thanks for being there
• Jon Williams: thanks for the juicy tips and suggestion to start this thing due to 2007 … see you in Vegas??
• Tara Hunt: thank you for the daily inspiration and reaffirmation that you don’t know you provide
• Jeff Molander (and Ms X): your podcast brought the noise and your kind words have kept me going
• Brian Littleton: the dartboard is already hanging
• Stephanie Agresta: thanks for the link love in your Holiday card
• Shmuel Tennenhaus: Superman is a jerk
• Jason Calacanis: thanks for the honesty and advice
• Headsets.com: appreciate the money!
• Jeff Doak: your insights on and off the screen are amazing and I appreciate all of them
• Wade and Dave from AffiliatePrograms: here’s to 2007
• Vertrue.com: thanks for the sponsorship!
• MyBlogLog team: thanks, guys
• Robert Scoble: appreciate the link love!
• SecondLifeVideo.com: thanks for the sponsorship… great site!
• Lina Buquet: thanks for encouraging the discussion
• Hugh McLeod: thanks for making the Affiliate Manifesto a reality and your kind words

There are a good deal more of you out there who have participated in the discussion, given suggestions and sent a long helpful tips or ideas, but I wanted to thank those who have directly affected this site and made it such an interesting place in only two months.

2007 will be a hectic year here because of CostPerJobs, a couple of great new sponsors coming in January and some other exciting new things going on behind the scenes here and there.

There will be light additions here until next Tuesday due to the Holidays. Check this out in the meantime and leave your hopes.

Thank you again for your help and your conversations! Here’s to many more-

Sam

Widgets will be hot in online marketing in 2007.

Why do I keep insisting that?

The metrics are right, the market is in demand, the new OS systems rolling out (Vista, Mac’s new OS X, and even Linux distro’s like my beloved Ubuntu) are encouraging widget use, and consumer adoption has begun now that the early adopter market has been saturated.

Watch for CPA networks and affiliate networks to increasingly make use of widgets over the next six months with the ability to share new offers, reporting, coupon codes, payout increases/decreases made available on the publisher’s desktop.

It will be an exciting time.

Here are two good sites I recommend checking out to help you contemplate the widget:

• Widgetbox: Like a Feedburner for widgets – find new widgets, monitor the distro of your own widgets, customize old widgets, etc
• Snipperoo gives a wrap up of the Widget Year in Review for 2006 with a month-by-month account of the development of the new platform and its increasing adoption in the online world.

During the Holiday downtime, play with a few of the widgets and give some thought as to how they can improve your program whether you’re a marketer, merchant, network or a publisher.

Huh?

What’s that you say?

You enjoy the conversations, content and growing community and you’d love to help contribute to making Cost Per News a reality every day but don’t want to pay the high monthly fee for advertising here?

I hear ya.

That’s why I’ve launched www.costperlove.com. There’s a link in the sidebar over on your right in case you want to visit later. You can participate as much or as little as you want.

• Throw down $5 to $10 bucks and you get a smiley linked to your program or site (or whatever custom message you’d like) on the bottom of every post for 24 hours after your donation.
• Throw down $20 and you get a heart linked to your program or site (or whatever custom message you’d like to pop up) on the bottom of every post for a week after your donation.
• Throw down something like $50 or more and we’ll work out something special for you (no, not like that).

The icons and links also show up on the feeds for the subscribers as well.
Everyone who shows some love will be included on a weekly “Thanks for the Love” post with links/tags to your program, blog, or favorite recipe site.

Have fun with it and let me know what you think.

Here’s your examples…

The already-happening yet next evolution of online marketing will be based on a hybrid CPA metric that backs out to a mutually acceptable CPC rate for both publisher and advertiser.

This is beginning to happen on the social platforms and will only escalate in 2007 as CPC and search continue to move farther apart from one another in performance numbers.

Metrics will be the talk of 2007.  Google, Yahoo, Omniture, Mercent, Doubleclick, ValueClick and Network Solutions (among others) are going to force a re-examination of the traditional velvet ropes separating CPA, CPC and even CPM.

(That’s a “liger” in the picture, by the way…hybrid…get it?)

I’ve spent a good deal of time this week making some serious back end and infrastructure improvements on the site. You won’t notice most of the changes, but the site will load much quicker and some of the flexibile width image problems people were having in IE7 (which they deserve for using IE7) have been fixed.

What you may notice is a shifting around of some of the content on the sidebars. If you have any suggestions or ideas of things you’d like to see on the site to make it a better place, don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments or send me an email (click on the little mail icon to your left). They can exist as WordPress plugins or be something that you just thought up… I’m pretty handy with PHP, MySQL, AJAX and HTML so I should be able to make them a reality.

Oh, and there’s a new PayPal tip jar link. I hope that’s not too awful. A few people have suggested me doing this so that they can give something back, and I appreciate their thoughts, so there you go. I’ll go the NPR route and say if you enjoy the content, please consider throwing a dollar or three in there.

Thanks for visiting and participating in the conversation!

Sam

Jeff Doak and Jeff Molander have raised interesting questions of branding and affiliate marketing’s place in defining brand channels in the comments of the post below on Twitter.

If what I’m saying about controlling your brand is correct, then the best bet for all media companies is to have their own fully branded distribution channel but also make sure they have a structure in place to reward other outlets for pushing their content. If a reward structure is in place but you only get rewarded under certain conditions (pre-roll a 10 second spot, link the content back to the channel, etc), then you’ve created a nearly perfect situation. Your advertisers now get their products seen not only on your main channel but across a huge network of niche sites who are all incentivized to push your product as well. That’s affiliate marketing again hitting its sweet spot.

Specifically how much control do brands, whether large national brands advertising on Comedy Central or brands using a channel such as affiliate marketing, have over their own image? How have brands using affiliate marketing dealt with the YouTube question?

Can the popular video portal YouTube work with brands within the confines of what is traditionally considered affiliate marketing?

Based on the uber-excellent conversation going on in this thread below, a few of us, at the behest of Brian Littleton’s helpful suggestion, have decided to do a series of posts based on web2.0 program adoption in affiliate marketing.

I’m sure most of you wouldn’t want to spill the beans on how you are using these emerging platforms as this sort of implementation is still “valuable” knowledge, but maybe we can lay out some ideas without giving away too much of the secret sauce?

I’ll do as many of these posts as you all think is necessary depending on the platform. Of course we’ll ask about MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and the more well knowns, but I wanted to start this with a service called Twitter which has been the latest rage amongst the A Listers.

Twitter was born as an interesting side project within the offices of Odeo in March of 2006. We are a part of Obvious Corporation in the beautiful South Park neighborhood of San Francisco, California.

Twitter is a relatively new service which allows you to make a quick post with your current thoughts, etc. It has been used by many (including myself) as a way of quickly social networking as you can send messages to Twitter via IM, txt messages from your cell or on the web.

The benefit is that if you are trying to reach a group of people, or even just one person, you can post up a message that will be received on the other person’s own time. I’ve even begun to schedule phone calls and conference calls with Twitter. Users can personalize the look and feel of their pages to suit their own personalities as well.

Here is my Twitter page

So, can this type of platform be used for affiliate marketing?

I’d argue that it could, but it would require a serious conversation based relationship with your users/readers/consumers/customers. That would require a re-thinking by many of the merchant programs already in the affiliate space.

The internationalization of online media continues.

Advertising Age reports that:

Publicis Groupe, the fourth-largest agency holding company, will acquire Digitas for $1.3 billion, Publicis said in a statement.

Paris-based Publicis will pay Digitas shareholders $13.50 for each share. Both boards have unanimously approved the offer, the statement said.

Additionally, ValueClick, 24/7 Real Media and aQuantive are seeing their stocks trading higher today as a result of the Digitas buy…

Online advertising firms 24/7 Real Media (Nasdaq: TFSM), ValueClick (Nasdaq: VCLK), AQuantive (Nasdaq: AQNT) are moving higher midday following the buyout of Digitas Inc. (Nasdaq: DTAS) for $13.50 per share by Publicis Groupe SA (NYSE: PUB)

2007 is shaping up to be the silly season of online media acquisitions!

Wayne Porter has posted some ground rules for including the virally spreading blog tag game on a ReveNews post.

To all Revenews Bloggers who want to post on the latest Tag Meme- we think the meme is wonder, beneficial and useful BUT WITHOUT APPROPRIATE CONTEXT OR GOALS- it is NOT APPROPRIATE AT REVENEWS.

Porter’s post raises an interesting and provoking question about what is actually acceptable and beneficial on a blog dealing with professional and business themes.  Are standards necessary for you to find value on such blogs or community blogging sites?

Heather Paulson writes about Porter’s insights and assimilates the issue with her own insights:

Five things I have learned about this tagged experience

1) Many bloggers are being tagged, and the phenomenon is wide spread throughout the internet

2) Viral marketing works!

3) There are many bloggers online who easily have access to each other, and news can spread quickly.

4) Messages and content can be misconstrued to sensitive audiences and information must be considerate even on a personal level concerning what those sensitivities might be especially on a collaborative or business blog.

5) The personal side of blogging is fascinating as we learn more (tidbits) concerning our fellow e marketers.

Kudos to Heather for raising the bar and using the tag meme game as a chance to explore the business related issues involved with this virally spread game, and blogging in general.  Her five points, rather than five insights about herself, point out the forward thinking that can be found within the realm of online and affiliate marketing.

A new study shows that social shopping results in higher conversion rates. It’s a difficult formula to reproduce, but it can be done given the right amount of research, time, energy and insight.

The study, “Engaging Advocates Through Search and Social Media,” shows how shoppers use e-mail, instant messaging and social networking sites to talk about the brands, products or categories that they like to buy and thereby influence other consumers to purchase them.

As consumers continue to move away from direct marketing (and indirect marketing) tactics such as email, banners and search results, the question of how to reach them within a cost per action conversation is a very valid and valuable thing to ponder.

Think about the average consumer in the crowded malls right now. How are they deciding what to buy? The old paradigms of stationary and fruitcake are gone. Chances are, that someone special has an Amazon Wishlisht (I do) or you can txt someone who knows them well to get a suggestion.

Any program that you run, participate in, or hope to build must have at its root a conversation between merchant/affiliate and consumer. If you don’t have that conversation built into your cost per action marketing program, you’ll get tuned out rather quickly in this world of txt, IM, MySpace and YouTube.

Who should take notice?

• Affiliate Networks
• CPA Networks
• Affiliates
• Publishers
• Email Marketers
• Website Marketers
• Co-Reg Marketers
• Search Marketers
• You

How do you participate in the conversation? Read Doc Searls, Jim Kukral, Shawn Collins, Tara Hunt, Seth Godin and mix all of that together into a warm challenging stew for whatever suits your program the best. Explore brave new worlds and watch the higher conversions (and more meaningful market relationships) roll in.

The new Digg interface is quite interesting and meta in its approach to all things social.

I suggest taking a look at the new podcasting interface, especially.  The interface blows away anything I’ve seen for podcast aggregation so far from sites like Odeo or Yahoo.

Users can listen to podcasts, digg/comment specific episodes and offer all sorts of feedback.  Does your program have a podcast?  Get it up there and let your affiliates digg away!  Good chewy web2.0 expsoure.

Even Molander’s Weekly Insight is already up.  I haven’t found Jim Kukral or Shawn and Lisa’s Affiliate Thing shows from BlogTalkRadio there yet.  If you know of any other, include in the comments so I can digg and pass them along as well.

Way to go, Kevin.

Online marketing can be effectively viewed as being composed of a series of hyper-short spheres of influence which pop into and out of existence like tiny subatomic particles. However, in online marketing, the interactions of these subatomic particles has implications for the next cycle and so on. So, the picture would be one event leading to the next event(s) in a chain reaction, or chain of entropy, scenario.

In the mid 90’s, the first banner ad led into a demand for CPM inventory which was quickly exhausted in a matter of years due to the limited number of sites and visitors of those sites. So, performance was included to hybridize the offline metric of CPM and what resulted was an early form of CPA where sites were forced to watch their own visitor rates and quality of responses. Around the turn of the century the performance metric of CPA was further given to hybridization in the form of CPC as marketers began to attempt to cope with shortened user attention and the network structure of the web being laid out on the lattices of links.

For the past three years, we’ve been contained within this paradigm of shortened user attention, traffic patterns and have attempted to come to terms with the situation by making the lattices of links a flexible structure. However, what many of us have realized through trial-and-error and experimentation is that the link lattice has a crystalline structure, meaning that due to its inherent properties it is not flexible. Objects in nature which have a crystalline structure are hard, good conductors of currents (think of electricity as traffic) yet brittle due to the way atoms have bonded together to make these structures.

The link lattice structure of search is operating very much the same way in online marketing. What we have discovered is that although a concrete and predictable model, the hierarchical link structure of operations such as search, email, web placements are not allowing the types of flexibilities which are needed in an ever more subjective online experience of users. Marketing that is not flexible, although profitable now, does not have a bright future in the next cycle of our chain reaction analogy.

In fact, the vehicles which have been successfully delivering the ads in this latest incarnation of online marketing, are getting left behind by the flexibility and usefulness of the ads themselves. Much like a virus who deposits its genetic material into a cell causing a mutation of that cell’s future replications, search, email, banners, text ads and link in general have been able to deliver their messages, but users are becoming immune, and inoculations to the success of these platforms (page view metrics, click counts, etc) are being developed and rapidly released to the masses (AJAX, widgets, etc).

Phil Wainewright of ZDNet gets its right when discussing Google’s Achilles Heel:

Now think for a moment why the ads work better than the search engine itself. The simple explanation is the wisdom of crowds. The ads are more accurate because they benefit from the concerted efforts of hundreds of advertisers competing with each other to float to the top of the ad rankings. Whereas the search results are based on algorithms that explicitly filter out the attempts of website owners to game the results. They’re based on the passive, serendipitous wisdom of hyperlinks.

So, in our analogy of emerging spheres from chain reactions, what does the next incarnation of online marketing look like? I’d venture to think it would resemble more of an amorphous solid rather than a crystalline solid. This would require a change in the underlying structure of the platforms. Rather than link lattices, think flexible and malleable plastics able to bend and shape differently based on user preferences and changing metrics.

It’s not about doom and gloom or apocalyptic predictions. There is no such thing as an end to everyting, whether in online marketing or biology or physics. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes from one form to another. The atoms which composed you were baked in the same big bang explosion as the atoms in our nearest star or the nearest Oak tree to your office. The atoms that compose you will go on to bond with other atoms and form other things after you have died. The shapes and forms of the atoms which compose online marketing, in the same fashion, will continue to exist and go on to bond and form with other atoms to create the next form of the online experience for individuals.