My 12 Problems

Here are the “12 Problems” I’ve built my current life around. These are non-negotiables, and they are also the focus of everything I do. If a situation doesn’t fit into one of these problems, I’ll generally relegate it, delegate it, or ignore it. 

I don’t generally recommend this practice for everyone. It’s a very difficult ethical standard to hold, and it can be cumbersome to run the mental math of “which problem am I trying to solve?” at any given time.

However, this approach’s clarity and focus far outweigh the negatives.

Here are my 12 Problems. I highly urge you to come up with your own:

  1. How can I have a positive impact on this world?

  2. How can I thrive while operating contrary to the dominant social or cultural trends?

  3. How can I inspire young people to appreciate learning as a practice?

  4. How do I provide for my family while remaining true to my calling?

  5. How can I live with the most ethical sustainability while not sacrificing my enrichment in balance with the Creation?

  6. How can I be the best role model for my espoused ideals and ethics as presented to my children and students?

  7. How can I live according to nature (kata phusin in Stoicism)?

  8. What does it mean to really be an effective teacher who can make connections and expand the worldview of my students?

  9. How can I be a good Dad, and what does that mean?

  10. How can I be a good partner, and what does that mean?

  11. How can I explore my own self and brain and express that in my life?

  12. How do I always maintain my own curiosity despite the challenges that the outside world might present?

Keyword Research Tips

Good overview of keyword research here. Too many people neglect the usefulness of thinking through important terms and keywords in their web site’s content or blog posts. If you ask a Googler how to rank better in their search engine, they’ll tell you to “write great content.” That’s true but deliberately thinking about your “main ideas” and including those terms in your content also helps that aspect of discovery marketing.

The one pushback I have is the need for landing pages focused on particular keywords… that was certainly true a few years ago, but recent Google algorithm changes have made that pretty much a waste of time and resources if the landing pages are being created with the direct purpose of keyword rankings…

Keyword research is the first step in the SEO copywriting process and an essential part of any SEO strategy. Before you write your website content you need to think about which search terms you want to be found for and this means getting inside people’s heads to find out which words they use when searching. Then you can use these exact terms in your content so that you start ranking for them. This is keyword research and this ultimate guide will take you through the many steps involved.

Source: Keyword research for SEO: the ultimate guide • Yoast

Yes, your brain (and mine) needs more downtime

“Downtime is an opportunity for the brain to make sense of what it has recently learned, to surface fundamental unresolved tensions in our lives and to swivel its powers of reflection away from the external world toward itself. While mind-wandering we replay conversations we had earlier that day, rewriting our verbal blunders as a way of learning to avoid them in the future.”

Source: Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime

Your phone’s homescreen is dead; or how native advertising wins in the post-mobile world

iphonenotificationsios9

“Part of this will entail  a shift in advertising to permission-based advertising:  asking the consumer whether she wants to see an ad — which would be asking her if she wants to receive information — for a particular brand at the current time. The consumer will have the choice: yes, I’m in the supermarket and I want to see the weekly specials; or no, I’m driving and I only want to receive breaking news that’s relevant to my family. She would no longer be forced to page through or scroll through irrelevant ads to reach what she needs.”

Source: Notification: The Post App World Revealed – Ad Tech Daily

I’ve been doing a ton of work and research in what comes “after” mobile… meaning, what advertising and marketing looks like now that our mobile devices are being used more than our laptops and desktops.

Your iPhone will look dramatically different in a few short years. I don’t mean the physical part. I mean the part you’re interacting with at the level where you once opened an app to check your latest Facebook Like notifications or new emails. There will be little-to-no reliance on that grid of apps that you belovedly call your homescreen.

I’ve been using my iPhone and Android phones this way the last few weeks and it’s been transformative. I could never go back to relying on opening apps from a homescreen to receive, process, or even create information (more on that soon).

Google, Apple, and Facebook all understand that the “future” (as in the next few years) will be dominated by notifications.

Just to think, Twitter had it right with Track all those years ago. Shame they double clutched the ball.

Native / content – advertising / notifications win… adblockers plus notifications plus better ad technology means branding and advertising will conflate. It’s going to be wild. Put on your VR helmets!

Discovery marketing = notifications.

 

Playing Checkers At a Chess Match

llamadress

We had the “viral singluarlity” happen on the internet last night and you can be sure that across newsrooms and marketing meetings this morning, there are discussions of dresses and llamas happening right this moment as the East Coast crowd goes to work and looks at all those sharing numbers and metrics.

However, only BuzzFeed is BuzzFeed.

Be yourself. Attract a different crowd with authenticity. Don’t listen to shallow marketers (hey, we’re not all shallow) telling you to “be viral” at all costs. There’s money and value in being different.

In this game, BuzzFeed is winning. It must boggle the mind at traditional publishers that seemingly the entire Internet is talking about content that was created not by a seasoned reporter but a “community growth manager.” These so-called premium publishing brands will inevitably lose their pricing power in the ad market as they continue to copy BuzzFeed. What’s more they’re playing catch-up in offering high-priced agency services that are fueling the models of BuzzFeed and Vice. There used to be an axiom in the tech market: It’s a bad idea to try to out-Google Google. Too many people tried that — Google “Accoona” sometime — and totally failed. These days, in viral publishing, it’s a bad idea for premium brands to try to out-BuzzFeed BuzzFeed. Soon, Time, Esquire, GQ and the like will become indistinguishable from BuzzFeed. And the problem with that is simple: BuzzFeed is better at being BuzzFeed than Time.

via The dress is white and gold. Or, why BuzzFeed won – Digiday.

Google Starts Ranking Your Site Based on Mobile Friendliness

We’ve known for a few months that Google was going to start ranking websites based on their ability to be displayed on mobile devices such as phones and tablets as well as traditional laptops and desktops. Looks like April 21 is the big day to have made the switch to a mobile-friendly site:

Big news from Google today: beginning April 21, the company will increase the ranking of sites that are mobile-friendly.

via Google Will Rank Your Site Higher If It’s Mobile Friendly.

Why is this important for non-profits, churches, religious groups, and community orgs in addition to startups and small businesses (most of our clients)?

Because even though search has had to share the limelight with social networks in terms of being “found” and “discovered” on the web, it’s still incredibly important to rank as well as you can in Google as search is still dominant.

You simply can’t afford to have a website that doesn’t display properly on an iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone etc after April 2015.

What if businesses and schools looking for big ideas followed Asimov’s advice?

The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.

via Published for the First Time: a 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity | MIT Technology Review.

A/B Testing for Mobile Websites Webinar

Split testing is incredibly important as all good marketers know.

A/B split testing on mobile is extremely important as more marketers are realizing in 2013 and definitely into 2014. I came across this webinar this morning and thought I’d share as it’s always a good idea to hear tactics from others to improve conversions (especially in mobile):

In one hour, you’ll learn:

How the right mobile strategy can accelerate your marketing ROI

Key mobile web design elements that improve conversions

How to use mobile A/B testing to drive conversions through the roof

via A/B Testing for Mobile Websites: A Crash Course Webinar | Mobify.

Yoast SEO Plugin and Modified Headers

 

I’ve used Yoast’s SEO WordPress plugin a great deal in the past when I needed a “set it and tinker when necessary” on a client site or affiliate site we’ve developed. I decided to give it a go with the fresh WordPress install we’re using for CostPerNews and discovered something that I’ve heard others complain about in the past… dual sitename titles both in the browser and in the meta.

So, a little googling turned this up:

I have taken a liking lately to Yoast’s SEO plugin.  So far, it just plain works.  Now I am not the type of guy to worry too much about this stuff.  I apply little tweaks here and there and maybe it helps.  But the plugin offers a lot of things I like, like bread crumbs, and easy access to my .htaccess file, and robots.txt.  Only a few things have to change to enjoy this plugin.  Let’s dig in to this.

via Modify Header.php to Get the Most Out of Yoast’s SEO Plugin in a TwentyTen Child Theme – VoodooPress

Basically, clean up your site’s title tags and you’re good to go.

Again, Yoast isn’t for everyone (interesting discussion in the comments if you’re into this type of thing). However, it’s free and is a nice helper when you’re looking for an optimization plugin for your affiliate site that is quick, generates clean sitemaps (necessary for hooking your site up to Google Webmaster Tools, which you should do regardless) or even optimizing your breadcrumbs (always good for SEO!) and cleaning up rel=author issues.

ShareThis Advances Web Marketing with SQI

ShareThis has always been something of an enigma for me. I’ve discussed how companies like ShareThis really are the future discovery motors that will ultimately replace search engines. Google itself gets this and is doing great things with Google Now to prevent itself from being usurped as the prime player in the mobile ad ecosystem.

You might have noticed I’ve added the ShareThis functionality (and a couple of our client blogs) to this site as I’ve been making the most of their platform. It’s been an interesting test to add the type of sharing functionality that moves conversations from a blog to a social outlet the way a commenting system might have done a few years ago.

More specifically, ShareThis has just added a new backend dashboard for publishers that really makes use of their data and your site’s data in a unique way (with a tie-in to Google Analytics).

Particularly interesting is the concept of SQI that plays into the dashboard:

Social Quality Index, SQI, measures the social quality of a website against the ShareThis Publisher Network. By favoring social interaction over broad reach, SQI puts the publisher’s audience and content into the spotlight. The SQI score measures social quality on a scale of 1 to 200, with 200 representing the highest social quality. This proprietary formula evaluates social metrics such as: outbound shares, inbound clickback traffic and page views to calculate the audience engagement of your site. Social quality denotes a good match between the publisher’s audience and the content and it is directly correlated with the number of times users return to the same page and the level of interaction with other media on the page, like ads.

It’s more than a semantic difference in approaches to marketing that ShareThis is promoting with the SQI concept. Rather than focus on silos like pageviews or clicks that (in reality) measure nothing, SQI provides a metric that actually has meat on the bone. It’s not a scarecrow but a tangible measurement that advertisers and publishers should be demanding in their campaigns. In effect, SQI take us beyond links as the currency of the web and gives us good reason to do so.

I’ve been a long time advocate of the idea that HTML and the web should evolve beyond the concept of a link for traffic flow. The “social web” of the last few years has definitely made that reality more possible than ever. However, companies and advertisers (and agencies) have been slow to pick up on that trend and we’ve been focusing most of our efforts at making a linked-based web marketing approach fit into what is now a share-based network of people.

My own mistake in the past has been to think of ShareThis as mostly a way to drive traffic on Facebook based on recommendations from readers/users/consumers. However, the real beauty of ShareThis lies in the analytics suite and API that allow for some pretty interesting implementations of data analysis.

Tools like ShareThis are taking us beyond a realized version of the web that still operates on the foundation of links (as it does in the HTML I’m writing this post in or the RSS pipes that you probably used to find out about and/or read this post) and even search but puts a layer on top that advances the discovery of relevant information, products or services.

The function of discovery through shared social currency is the key benefit of betting on services such as ShareThis over traditional and limited marketing channels that rely on more costly and less targeted consumer acquisition methods.

We’ve seen our clients marvel at the real benefits of discovery marketing compared to their previous methods of siloed channels because the reach, scope and golden fleece of “social media marketing” success becomes readily apparent when you analyze the data points between these methods.

That is the transformation that is so hard to grasp for many companies. Going from a model based on having results that come from money poured into a model based on time and cultivation is difficult. ShareThis and the whole economy of “sharing” changes the conversation from intention to attention.

Traffic flows on the web and that flow is very powerful if you properly set the channels for that flow to occur rather than trying to build irrigation channels for the flow to take right angles.

ShareThis functions very much as a link, or vehicle, to get web users/interested buyers from one place to another in much the same way Google has been our chauffeur for years. Those places include the traditional Facebook and Twitter malls but increasingly Google+ (and Google Now) is making an interesting stab at becoming what the search engine could not (which is why Google is throwing the mass of its own juggernaut behind the project).

SQI could evolve into something very important for this next iteration of marketing on the web. We’ll certainly be pushing our clients towards that realization. Conversation at scale is the real ingenuity here and something to keep an eye on.

On Facebook, It’s Pay to Play if You Want to Be Seen

This comes as no real surprise for marketers who use Facebook to promote products, offers or brands, but if you’re not willing to pay up you’re probably not going to show up with as many likes or engagement as you had hoped for:

On Facebook, Sharing Can Come at a Cost – NYTimes.com: “To my surprise, I saw a 1,000 percent increase in the interaction on a link I posted, which had 130 likes and 30 reshares in just a few hours. It seems as if Facebook is not only promoting my links on news feeds when I pay for them, but also possibly suppressing the ones I do not pay for.”

Hunter Walk also has a few good theories as to why engagement stats on Facebook seem to be dipping including better spam fighting, effects of ad models and the impact of mobile UX.

Having been on the organic and paid side of Facebook marketing, I’ll stick with the pay-to-play theory for now.

Social Media Marketing Sizes Cheat Sheet

We use this as our internal “cheat sheet” for social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ at Harrelson Agency for finding the right size for images and texts.

It’s a great quick reference to help our clients get the job done.

You can grab a copy from Scribd below or use this Dropbox link for a view or download.

Enjoy!

Social Media Marketing Sizes Cheat Sheethttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/118366124/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-27uvd00byzynodbr39xn(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

Discovery in Your Comments

Disqus keeps improving both as a commenting and discussion platform but especially as an advertising platform.

Disqus gets in right in a critical way. They aren’t selling their advertising strategy to only publishers or only advertisers. They also aren’t leaving out users.

Just as we talk of Discovery as a combination of three things (paid search, SEO and social media marketing), Disqus is using the term “Discovery” as the linchpin for their strategy towards both publishers and advertisers (and especially users).

From TheNextWeb:

In addition, it keeps on improving its algorithm to increase the targeting of the content it recommends. Relevance is key here; it means that publishers can boost page views and drive traffic to advertisers without annoying their readers. This is the challenge of Disqus’ model, but also its power, as it focuses on three parties at once: publishers, advertisers and users.

We’ll be experimenting with Disqus’ model in a few weeks with a new client and can’t wait to see the results. We’ll def report back when we have some hard data.

In the meantime, go explore how comments, discussion and user interaction can also mean a better experience for your business for you and the people you’re trying to have discover you.

Google Maps App and Mobile Discovery

Smart piece that highlights some of the reasons we love the new Google Maps app on iOS and why it spells out the future of the (mobile) web…

Why Google Just Made iPhone King: Ads | Wired Business | Wired.com: “Google’s willingness to ship iOS apps could look smarter as time goes on. The company trounces Apple when it comes to all things cloud, not just maps and e-mail; its social network, search engine, and highly optimized data centers could give its iOS apps an even bigger edge in the coming years.”

Discovery means you’ll be able to “map” what your friends are liking, sharing and discovering themselves in an effortless and responsible manner. As we continue to kick the tires on the social web, we’re excited to see where this next discovery phase takes us.

Mobile Means Disocvery

We like to chirp on and on (and on) about the need for companies to invest in what we call Discovery (again… a blend of organic SEO, paid search and social media campaigns that all tie nice and neatly together at the end of the day and/or month).​

However, one thing that we don’t get to chirp about directly, unless you’re in a client meeting with our team, is how insanely powerful mobile marketing is for everyone.​

Mobile is not only the new hotness, it is the next wave of consumer interaction.​

Here’s a great article from Matthew Creamer in AdAge about the Marketing’s Next Five Years that makes our point pretty well…​

To put it bluntly, there needs to be more ad spending on mobile, which now comprises only about 1% of budgets, according to a recent study from the consultancy Marketing Evolution. Based on ROI analyses of smartphone penetration, that figure will be about 7%. In five years’ time, that number will need to be in excess of 10%.

75% of the world will be covered in 3G wireless data connections in 5 years. Let that soak in for a moment.​

We’re in the middle of a radical transition from laptops and desktops to iPads and mobile computing devices (which are capable of making the occasional phone call).​

Being prepared for this reality in the coming months/years is going to be (or should be) a major part of each of your strategy sessions.​

Sample Weekly Discovery Report We Provide Clients

Here’s an example of the weekly (or bi-weekly) stats and analytics report we like to provide to each our clients​ about their Discovery (SEO, Paid Search and Social Media Optimization/Ads) marketing campaigns

​(The text, report and analytics are all real-life examples but we’ve changed the client’s name with their permission):

Harrelson Agency WEEK 2 Discovery Report for SAMPLEhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/109210914/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-20sn0genr12c2vl2eiy8&wmode=opaque

Affiliate Site Twitter Profile Pages

If you’re using Twitter in conjunction with your other social media marketing plans for your affiliate site, don’t forget the important aspect of the design of your Twitter Profile page.

TheNextWeb has a nice practical guide for points to consider when doing so (it’s aimed at brand marketing folks, but still applicable for performance marketers)…

Tips for Twitter Brand Pages: “The header image can be used to direct the user’s attention to a specific item on the page, as was the case in HP’s example, or it can be used to promote an engaging marketing plan, as Staples did, with a competition. Using the header image as nothing more than a banner advert, as both McDonald’s and Coca-Cola did, wound up getting the least attention from viewers.”

Word of caution here… unlike Facebook Fan Pages or even Google+ pages, Twitter Profile pages area mixed bag. Yes, they are somewhat customizable and the new embedded media feature helps the look/feel. However, up to 1/2 (depending on whose numbers you trust) of Twitter users access the service via mobile or apps. I’d venture to posit (strongly) that most “power” users that are desirable for many niches are these types of app users (I rarey go to the main Twitter page and most of my network is similar).

So, design and test but don’t fret if you don’t see the type of interaction you do with a Facebook Fan page etc. Twitter, unlike Facebook, has lots of meaning in the message.

What is the Job of Social Logins on Your Site?

I wish Craig would have included his sources for which research he cites here…

Should You Use Social Login’s?: “Wondering  which social logins are the most popular option among users? Well, according to research, 42 percent of social logins use Facebook while the remaining alternatives are fairly equally distributed among Yahoo, Paypal, Google and others. If you can only select one form of social login…make it Facebook.”

Regardless, if you’re going to use social plugins for commenting, subscriptions, engagement, sharing etc on your site, I would hesitate to decide on just one to elevate unless you do your own careful research and heuristics on your actual site(s).

For instance, I have sites that receive the majority of their “social” traffic from Facebook and I have sites that receive virtually all of their social traffic from sites like Reddit and Twitter.

All traffic is not good traffic. Having passive visitors from Facebook that have nothing to do with performance marketing is grand, but doesn’t do much for the bandwidth costs of this site. Similarly, passive Twitter or search traffic that arrives at one of my niche book sites doesn’t do much for me (beyond pageview ego petting) compared to the Facebook or Amazon search traffic that supports and livens those sites.

So, as always, remember that your site is doing a job for people. Figure out what that job is for people and offer them the service that you would want if you were hiring your site to do a job for your mother. Limit their choices, walk them through the process, do friendly follow up and make them want to refer you and come back (as Jangro reminds us, make them yours).

Check your stats and see where the bulk of that traffic might be coming from and why and then decide if you want to elevate a social login (which you definitely should) service on your site.

Back to Podcasting

I’m so excited to be back into podcasting on my own turf. This episode mentions a number of affiliate marketing related topics, so I don’t mind posting here as well:

ThinkingDaily: I Am a Breathing Time Machine: Thinking.FM

Exciting (for me at least)!

Here’s the mp3 or click above to listen to the stream (and/or subscribe in iTunes).

Now go and make your own affiliate podcast.

More on Like-Jacking and Quality Traffic

Last week I posted about the rise of “Like-Jacking” on Facebook and why digital literacy is so important. The WSJ covers the issue this morning as well…

Spam Finds a New Target – WSJ.com: “A common social-spam attack on Facebook, known as “like-jacking,” involves duping users into clicking on an image that looks as if a friend has clicked the “Like” button, recommending it.”

When I first got my start in the online marketing world, I worked at an email marketing firm that helped spark the “Free iPod” phenomenon in exchange for just an email address and zip code. It was amazingly profitable and I soon learned why. People want freebies.

However, the quality of traffic was terrible and the lists were sold and resold so many times that any value they might have had were soon distilled into the ether.

The same holds true for Facebook Likes and retweets today and the growing realization that all traffic is not good traffic (especially traffic derived from passive social traffic that is unqualified and not valuable).

Dash and Affiliate Pageviews?

Interesting concept for a company looking to posit itself in the already heated analytics space…

Parse.ly Will Launch Its Pageview-Generating Machine Called “Dash” This Month | TechCrunch: “Dash aims to help publishers increase pageviews by providing insight into what topics are trending and what topics they should write more about or less about, among other things. But most importantly, its predictive analysis engine is able to recommend what topics publishers should cover right now to be on top of future trends. Simply put, it’s a pageview-generating machine.”

Dash sounds like it might have the predictive chops to fill a gap between aggregate analytics programs and more real time programs by focusing on the predictive side of things.

The question will be whether it actually works for niche sites and not just mega Twitter-style trends.

If Dash does work well with niche traffic predictive analysis, it could be a very very useful tool for affiliates.

Keep an eye out.

RSS is Still Important for Marketers

I love my RSS feeds that I’ve been curating over the last six or so years. I still think that as a delivery medium RSS is part of the future of the web.

However, RSS has always taken a back seat to other ways of capturing and engaging visitors to other tactics such as email. As Scott Jangro wrote in a recent comment here:

All Traffic is Not Good Traffic | Discussion: “But can you do something to capture them as your own?  That should be the primary focus on that traffic. Give them something that will get them to give you their email address, or sign up and get involved in a website.  The latter is harder than the former.

So regardless of the traffic source, who are these users that are coming by, and what can you do to make them *yours*?”

There’s a mighty good reason that RSS takes a back seat to email or some other “capture” mechanism… RSS is insanely nerdy and grows more so every day/month/year. There was a great hope of people like me who saw RSS as a very viable platform that could transform the way the web delivers content and news to most individuals and we’d all be running around reading our feeds on browsers or our devices to our whims (instead of turning to mediated sources like cable news or heavens forbid network news).

That didn’t happen.

For sure, RSS is alive via platforms like the awesome Flipboard app, which is much more “user friendly” than NetNewsWire or Google Reader will ever be (though much less satisfying if you ask me).

RSS is still very much alive as a pure web medium as well. So why should marketers care about RSS subscriptions?

Because all traffic is not good traffic. The traffic you should be concerned about as a marketer is the highly qualified traffic that has the potential to not only convert into some action but become a part of the actual community that will grow and build a site over the long run (if you care about such things, which you should).

Yes, that can be accomplished via email newsletters and lists. However, email lists and RSS subscribers are almost apples and oranges in terms of comparison when considering how they interact with a site and what type of user community can be built with their help and engagement.

RSS subscribers are by nature a nerdy and dedicated bunch… don’t count them out in your efforts. Their numbers may be small (and growing smaller all the time in your Feedburner etc stats) but their power is mighty as I consistently encounter.

Why Freemiums Aren’t the Future Path

Interesting piece by Tac Anderson on the concept of Path as an Upstream Social Network (USN below) compared to traditional networks like Twitter and Facebook which he terms Downstream Social Networks (DSN below) and how USN’s could affect the engagement of marketers with lucrative data-rich networks:

What Path Teaches Us About The Future of Social Networks | @NewCommBiz: “Lets assume for a minute that as social networking evolves the social graph is filled with private USN and more open, commercial DSN. And what if most of those USN didn’t allow brands and advertising in? (Most of them will but humor me for a minute.) If marketeers and brands want to reach people inside their private USN, they need to be brought in by the members of those networks. Brands need to create experiences worth talking and sharing. A small example is when I shared my new Star Wars Moleskine I was going to be using on Path. You can see the reactions I got on Path as well as those I got on Instagram. Both of those went to Twitter and received their own reactions there.”

Basically, he ponders what if these Downstream Social Networks could thrive with a fermium model where brands and ads weren’t allowed to participate.

I’m not certain this will ever happen for a couple of reasons.

1) Social networks, unlike apps, don’t necessarily proliferate based on individual user experiences. Freemiums work on iPhone apps or even cloud based services that are more single user in nature. Social networks are, by their nature, commons that we don’t have complete control over and we’re more willing to make compromises on design, ads and privacy (hence Facebook).

2) The data-based nature of social networks is so lucrative that even new networks that are beautifully designed and based on the idea of limits (150 friends only, limited sharing etc) will certainly find more and better funding by relying on brands and marketers to subsidize the costs of running a network.

Path (and Facebook) can and should do all they can to encourage marketers to think above the “All Traffic is Good Traffic” blasting approach that many marketers use to get passive and relatively unqualified (and thereby low quality) traffic to their sites/offers/links and think towards better engagement based on some qualitative value in the exchange.

However, freemiums aren’t in our future for social networking.

This may all sound like it has more to do with brand advertisers than direct or affiliate marketers, but I’d argue affiliate marketing has the most to gain from the idea of interacting in these rich spaces of real human interactions and frictionless sharing.

Mobile, Social Media and Curation Marketing

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a nice retort to a thought piece published in the Washington Post today proclaiming social media’s growth over…

Dead? Social Media’s Explosive Growth is Only Beginning: “Social media in the age of instrumentation and connected devices may be more about aggregate social activity than about the long voice blogging and Tweeting.

The intersection of people, machines and passively monitored objects (the cheapest input of all!) all combine to form an entirely new world of opportunity.

That may be the biggest opportunity yet.”

There’s a fascinating conversation going on in the comments section of a post here yesterday about my idea that all traffic is not good traffic. Scott Jangro adequately summarizes the point that Marshall is making above about in-and-out traffic through various spaces in relation to online marketing. His comment could easily be unpacked into a book or treatise about marketing in 2012.

For our purposes here, if you take what Scott wrote and combine that with what he, Damien and the team are doing with Shareist or what affiliates are doing with Pinterest, it becomes very interesting to ponder the conjunction of mobile traffic with aggregation and curation services on the web and their impact on affiliate marketing.

At least I think so.

The idea that curation will become a hot talent in the coming years as frictionless sharing and more aggregate traffic becomes ubiquitous is nothing new, especially in the world of education (part of the “Essential Skills” for our Middle School is curation).

However, wrap curation and its rapidly apparent place in the affiliate marketing industry and a particularly interesting new niche becomes a very viable space for hyper-targeted affiliates to explore.