2008 - Page 65 of 102 - Sam Harrelson

Embargoes and The Rest of Us

Although I did win “Best Blogger” at the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle awards this year, I am by no means an A Lister. I live in North Carolina, I don’t blog 20 hours a day and I’ve never been on the Gillmor Gang (although Gillmor did comment on one of my posts a while back, which was neat).

So, I was a little surprised last month when I unknowingly broke an embargo regarding Disqus’ integration of Seesmic…

Disqus Now Has Seesmic Integration at CostPerNews: “Now, you can enable video comments through Seesmic integration with Disqus.”

I’m reminded of this because I was goofing around on Summize this morning and came across this back-and-forth between Robert Scoble and CenterNetworks’ Allen Stern:

Truth be told, I stumbled upon the new feature that morning while approving a comment and just before heading out on a flight. I thought it was curious, so I did what any blue-blooded American with a blog would do… I blogged it. I was almost late for my flight, but I thought it was a neat new feature that I wanted to share with my small yet devoted audience here.

When I landed later that day, I had a number of emails flood into the BlackBerry asking why I “went early” with the story and broke the embargo. I felt bad at first, but then I realized that I had blogged about a feature that was already there… how was that breaking anything?

If I had been aware of such an embargo, I would have definitely not posted the story until the approved time (I’ve honored dozens of them here) and really don’t see the need or gain from being able to yell “FIRST!” on TechMeme at this point (this blog has been around for a while, is comfortable in its little niche and is not meant to be on TechMeme anyway).

Moral of the story… if you’re a tech provider / merchant and you’re going to put a-listers under an embargo, don’t release the feature early so that z-listers like myself can see and blog about it.

Belated apologies to Robert, Allen, TechCrunch, etc for jumping the gun of a race I didn’t know I was running.

Amazon Kindle

Finally getting one in the mail…

I can’t wait.

I’ll give it a video review as soon as I get it in my hands!

Motive Interactive Videos (Chris Rodeno)

We’re doing a few videos highlighting the awesome staff of Motive Interactive this week.

Here’s the first featuring affiliate manager Chris Rodeno:

More to come…

10 Steps to Tracking Your Social Reputation

After my whuffie post last week, I had a number of people ask me how to keep track of their social reputation beyond just doing Google searches on yourself or your company’s name.

First of all (and perhaps most importantly), you have to get an RSS reader (aka feed reader). You don’t have the time yada yada yada, but if you care about your online reputation or who is mentioning you or your company, then you certainly have the time. If you’re on Windows, grab FeedDemon (free). If you’re on a Mac, use NetNewsWire (free). If you’re on Linux, grab Liferea from the depositories. If you want to live “in the cloud” and use a web app, you can’t go wrong with Google Reader.

Got one? OK, next step… actually find places that have the data your’e looking for. Here’s how I do it for myself, CostPerNews, my podcast and Motive Interactive:

1. In your feed reader of choice, create a folder called “Vanity Searches” or “Social Graph.”

2. Grab the “Google Alerts” for all of the terms you need to watch. This is social reputation 101 and chances are you have heard of Google Alerts. However, it’s amazing to me how many online marketers don’t use the service. You can get email. This is delivered by email instead of RSS as well.

3. Google Blog Alerts works similarly to Google Alerts but is a little more comprehensive. There’s some redundancy with Alerts, but it’s still worth watching.

4. Another oldie but goodie is Technorati. While not always up to date or accurate, there’s still some value in watching your brand there. Just put in whatever term or name your watching in the search bar on the upper right and grab the feed on the results page by clicking the RSS button.

— Now that we’ve gotten the foundation out the way, let’s go to the good stuff —

5. Here’s an excellent “Yahoo Pipe” for keywords that monitors news sources from multiple sites such as Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, PRWeb, and Google News. Just put in whatever term you’re looking to watch, hit “Run Pipe” and then click the RSS button beside “More Options” on the right. This is probably my favorite way to track things on the web.

6. The grandaddy of all Yahoo Pipes for vanity searching is the Social Media Firehose. Works the same way as the keyword pipe above but gives a wide blast of data. It’s valuable, but you have to weed through a lot of duplications. Still recommend.

7. While you’re at Yahoo Pipes, grab the “Twitter Reply Sniffer.” Basically, this is a way for you to stay aware of anyone that @’s you in Twitter (you’re not on Twitter? Geez). Put in the terms or names you’d like to keep track of and you’ll get a custom URL. You then have the option to receive new alerts via Google, email, phone or RSS. Click on that orange RSS button called “more options” over on the right and add it to your “Social Graph” folder in your feed reader when the prompt comes up. Presto.

8. If your company might have some mentions on YouTube, you can track user tags and mentions using this YouTube tag Pipe. Not useful for everyone, but still good to have in the old feed reader.

9. Along those same lines, you can’t go wrong with Summize. Instead of just monitoring @’s on Twitter, Summize notifies you anytime a term you specify is mentioned. Grab the RSS feed on the right and add it into your feed reader. Highly valuable.

10. FriendFeed is becoming a great way to keep track of how others perceive you in the social media space because it is one big aggregation ball of goo. However, you can make some sense of out that with FriendFeed’s nifty search feature. Just put in whatever you’re keeping track of and grab the RSS from the page (should be in the URL address bar). Add that to your feed reader for sure.

If you follow those 10 steps, you should have a pretty good grip on what people are saying about you on the social web from Twitter to FriendFeed to blogs to Digg to YouTube. My “social graph” folder in my feed reader is increasingly becoming the first place I go in the mornings for news just to see if there’s anything going on that I’ve missed or to see if there are any conversations I can have with fans, friends, foes or potential evangelists.

Hope this helps!

GeekCast 21: How to Recruit Affiliates

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Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Lisa Picarille and I recorded GeekCast 21 on Tuesday. If you’re interested in how to recruit affiliates in this changing landscape, give it a listen…

GeekCast 21: The Art of the CPA Pitch : GeekCast.fm: “The first few minutes of the show describes innovative ways to recruit affiliates outside of the traditional emails and cold calls (which are becoming increasingly ineffective). The conversation steers into the direction of why companies like Apple and Microsoft fight over the ‘cool’ factor in their marketing campaigns.”

The show runs about 80 mins and is filled with all sorts of geeky goodness (Twitter, video, stats, etc).

AvantLink Throwing Email and Search Affiliates Under the Bus

AvantLink has a post on their blog addressing the now effective (as of June 1) New York state “affiliate tax.”

While most of the post does a good job of laying out the issue with practical examples, this part at the end of the post caught me by surprise:

New York Sales Tax, Merchants and their Affiliate Programs · AvantLink’s Affiliate Marketing Blog: “To prevent falling into the scenario of Example 2 we propose adding the following terms to your Merchant program terms:

‘New York State Affiliates may not solicit New York State residents by using flyers, newsletters, telephone calls, e-mails, PPC ads, or any other type of Internet marketing techniques besides web site advertising links.’”

That’s well and good for some affiliates who still just do banners, but I’d argue that many (if not most) affiliates doing more than $50 a month now utilize some sort of PPC or email component as a part of their campaigns or traffic generation. To amend merchant terms saying that affiliates can only use banners seems more than heavy handed and follows the same draconian logic as employed in the actual NY state law.

If you look at the “Top 10 Affiliate Programs” from last month, at least 7 (probably 9) of them rely (some heavily) on PPC and email. To lop off those channels of traffic generation within a network doesn’t solve the NY problem.

Affiliate marketing has become a much larger umbrella than just banner ad placements on static html websites. In addressing this issue, we need to make sure we’re letting both merchants and NY state know that.

What am I missing here?

[Update] Gary from AvantLink adds this in the comments on their blog post:

4Gary M on Jun 3, 2008 at 6:30 am:

Our recommendation does not disallow email marketing and PPC altogether. Rather, email and PPC targeted at New York residents.

While that’s a good point and clarification of the suggested terms, I still don’t think it’s a fix for many/most affiliates doing business in NY state or with their residents. Geo-targeting is an expensive proposition and this seems to be putting yet more responsibility on the affiliate and further alleviating the merchant from responsibility or diligence.

Is the NY State Affiliate Tax That Big of Deal?

There has been much hand wringing in the world of affiliate marketing over the so-called New York state “affiliate tax.” However, as Trust points out on ABW, it doesn’t seem that 99% of merchants running affiliate programs care much…

How Are Merchants Finding Out About This? – ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum: “Looking at this list and I only see about 40 merchants (so far) which is maybe at most 1% – 2% of merchants with affiliate programs who have dropped NY affiliates. So was wondering if we have a whole bunch more coming and if all the merchants know about this or what. Or if it’s going to be an overall small percentage that drop affiliates.”

Is that a symptom of poor communication by New York state legal authorities, legal counsels, affiliates…or is this really not that big of deal?

There have been a plethora (literally) of blog posts in the affiliate-blog-osphere about the issue ranging from Shawn Collins and Linda Buquet‘s respective reporting to ReveNews coverage to Peter Bordes at Relevantly Speaking chiming in to our discussions on GeekCast to even networks like ShareASale offering strong and well thought-out advice for merchants.

However, merchants really don’t seem to be paying too much attention to all of this.

Once again, I defer to Trust on ABW:

I guess I was expecting a whole slew of new drop notices today, haven’t seen anybody post anything new. In the end if it winds up only being about 1% – 2% then that’s really not much at all. I guess we’ll have to wait to see how this turns out but at this point not as bad as I thought it would be. Time will tell.

Is this just the latest Froogle?

I’m not so sure. I do think there is a considerable need for affiliate marketers to educate and inform merchants about the viability and importance of the performance channel in terms of their bottom line, but “affiliate marketing” as we know it is SO wide ranging and dispersed at this point that it would take Microsoft creating their own loyalty program to get us to organize… oh, wait.

In other words, our conception of “affiliate marketing” (in my opinion) is rapidly evolving away from just the network/affiliate model that has served us well (and badly) for the last decade. “We” are moving into video, lead gen, offline, mobile, widgets, social media, search and all sorts of places that we didn’t envision a decade ago. I would venture to say that at least 75% of the people doing affiliate marketing don’t even know they are doing affiliate marketing.

I’m not arguing for a name change or anything of that nature. However, I do want us to realize that while the NY affiliate tax has certainly caused its share of fear and loathing, we need to realize that this industry has fractured and continues to move away from anything resembling an industry. Coming up with an organized group to represent its needs and views may be as difficult as getting merchants to address the NY state issue.

So here’s my take: Merchants are letting legal figure this out (if they even need to). We should be proactive but realize that interstate commerce is a very complicated subject and requires highly skilled lawyers (and such) to grok. I doubt if NY state’s tax will survive the appeal process based on my understanding of what’s happening, but I’m no lawyer.

In the meantime, it looks to be business as usual.

Twhirl and FriendFeed Room Sharing Coming Soon?

Twhirl (recently acquired by Seesmic) is the most interesting of the Twitter desktop apps. I’ve never been a big fan as I relied heavily on Twitter’s GTalk integration to get real time updates and use Track via XMPP.

However, for FriendFeed, Twhirl rocks.

So, I found this note from Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur interesting…

I’ve been playing with FriendFeed’s Room feature in the Affiliate Marketing Room. It’s fairly nifty and should only get better.

Loic mentioned on a Gillmor Gang podcast a few weeks ago that Twhirl is working on a feature to allow for XMPP to flow through its service in Twitter as well. If that happens, I might be using Twhirl a great deal more.

Affiliate Marketing on FriendFeed

For any affiliate marketers who are also FriendFeed users or fans, I created a public room called “Affiliate Marketing”:

FriendFeed: “Affiliate Marketing” Room

Why would this be useful? Well, you get the best of FriendFeed (comments, sharing of interesting or relevant stuff from around the web, some aggregation, RSS etc).

No high expectations for this, just thought I’d put it out there for any aff marketers already on FriendFeed (and if you are, make sure to friend me at samharrelson).