Category: Affiliates

GigaOm has an important scoop…

Now I have some skinny on a recent development that could have long-term ramifications, among them Google sending more traffic to Facebook.com.

The company will soon announce that some application canvas pages (ones that don’t require a special login) will become publicly indexable by search engines like Google. So for instance, our GigaOM Question Of The Day app can be indexed and made available in some limited form to people not logged onto Facebook. Apps get a public-facing web presence of their own.

If this is the case, imagine the SEO’ers scratching their head as they try to optimize their FB pages. At any rate, this is as good a reason as any for your company to start taking social media seriously.

Facebook really is boring me with their marketing attempts. I’ve basically begun to snub my nose at it because, quite simply, what they’ve rolled out so far will never work or sustain any sort of revenue for advertisers (or marketers). There are already too many concerns over privacy, data ownership and FB’s long term sustainability as a platform to cause much skirt hiking.

Beacon is a horrible idea and has been sloppily executed. It reminds me of the toolbar apps from 2002.

I like (love?) Facebook as a social network, but as a marketing paradigm, it’s just not a good fit… at least for marketing in its current stage of evolution. Perhaps one day marketing will be able to find employment in social networks, but at this point we’re still too closely linked to offline models and metrics that break down when you try to translate them to the social networking world (or the web in general in my opinion).

Google owns advertising and will continue to do so (especially after they move into mobile and/or release their GDrive application and start paying users to host their data in exchange for ads to compete with Amazon who will do the same… yeah, you heard me).

Tony Hung has a good run down of possible futures for Facebook if Beacon crumbles.

MarketingProfs has a nice piece on the up and coming Seesmic video site. While it is easy to dismiss Seesmic as Yet Another Video Site, there is a good deal of market differentiation which sets Seesmic apart. Think Twitter with video and the ability to really scale once the kids start playing with it:

What do you get when you combine video, social networking, micromedia, and a very savvy French entrepreneur? You get Seesmic.

The site is a social network where the primary content is video. Users record video, post it to the site, and other users reply in video.

Seesmic is the brainchild of French blog star Loic Le Meur and aims to do to video conversations what Twitter did to text-based conversations.

And here’s a little video I just did:

http://seesmic.com/Standalone.swf?video=cZDXD40rKt

Video as a Personal Communication Tool

I use Google Reader to plow through about 500 feeds (mostly marketing or tech related) and publicly "share" items that I find particularly interesting throughout the day.

If you’d like to get into the whole RSS or syndication thing but don’t have time to read through a bunch of feeds, you can subscribe to (or just visit) my shared items page.  Consider it a "best-of" the affiliate, search, performance and tech marketing universe.

samharrelson’s shared items

Google Reader -samharrelson’s shared items

Earlier this week I was on a social media panel for the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association in Raleigh, NC with pr guru Peter Shankman.

We were speaking to a highly marketing literate crowd of about 100 or so offline and online companies interested in the social media space.  The question of privacy came up, and Peter made the excellent point that:

"Privacy is currency."

This is an incredibly powerful statement for marketers to keep in mind as we explore and try to find the new metrics that will adequately measure the online space.  I brought up the issue of "attention metrics" and "attention currency" when someone asked about how to monetize Twitter or Facebook.  Looking back, I think Peter’s theory of privacy currency is even more compelling and takes things like attention into its fold.

Keep that in mind when deploying social media campaigns or when attempting to "monetize" Facebook et al.

In relation to Peter’s point, my closing statement went along the lines of "online privacy might be a tightly held currency and an illusion, but permission is not."

In other words, the marketing metrics of the 21st century (both online, offline and in the strange hybrid of relativist space that exists between them) will swing between the pendulums of privacy and permission.

Hadn’t seen this on ABW yet, but Shawn has news that Ticketmaster (under the IAC umbrella along with Ask.com, etc) is launching their affiliate program with buy.at:

Wow – I just stumbled across some BIG news on the buy at, Inc forum at ABestWeb: Ticketmaster chooses buy at, Inc – Beta affiliate program launch!

Shawn includes:

I’d imagine there is some hand wringing in the board rooms of the other U.S. affiliate networks right about now.

Have to agree, Shawn.  This has the potential to be a huge program and really put buy.at on the map here in the States.  I love music blogs and subscribe to a good number of them.  Having the option to support my favorite sites while getting tickets (which I do frequently) to shows they describe is a win-win.  The implications for affiliate sales on those is huge… not to mention long tail local sites. 

Hats off to the buy.at team for landing this big fish and potential cash cow (I limit myself to two animal analogies in each post).

Ticketmaster Launches Beta Affiliate Program with buy at, Inc | Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

I’m excited to be a part of the new Board of Advisors at Affiliate Classroom.  We’ll be working with two of my favorite people, Anik Singal and Rachel Honoway, to bring value to the general community of affiliates and affiliate managers as our industry continues to develop.

Affiliate Classroom, a publisher of educational tools for the interactive advertising industry, has appointed a board of advisors.

Recently appointed Board of Advisors are…

• Peter Figueredo, CEO and co-founder of NETexponent
• Sam Harrelson, CEO of ReveNews
• Jeremy Palmer – Owner and creator of “Quit Your Day Job”, co-creator of PPC Classroom
• Heather Paulson – President and founder of Paulson Management Group, Inc.
• Brook Schaaf – CEO of Schaaf Consulting

Board of Advisors Appointed for Affiliate Classroom | Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

I’m still rather bear-ish on the prospects of continued growth for the internet advertising universe.  That sounds heretical given my job and lifeblood, but we can’t expect the continuing economic downturn here in the US to support continued online growth.

New figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers show that internet advertising continues to grow to record levels, with the 3rd quarter internet ad spend in the United States hitting $5.2 billion, a $1.1 billion/ 25.3% increase over the same quarter in 2006.

In fact, I think we’re headed for more than a bubble pop of web2.0 as ad budgets will certainly be one of the first things to get slashed when the economy takes its eventual nosedive.  In the midst of all that doom and gloom, I do see the smart and adaptable small companies weathering the kill-off, just as our mammal ancestors did a few million years ago.

IAB: Internet Advertising Continues To Head North

Google just took over the mobile world…

Caroline Middlebrook has put together a tremendous guide to Twitter (both how and why answered).

I’ve started directing people here when they ask me why I Twitter and what I get out of Twitter (since I’ve been there for about a year now).

Required reading…

The Big Juicy Twitter Guide

The Big Juicy Twitter Guide | Caroline Middlebrook