LinkedIn Means Business With New Application Platform: “LinkedIn has launched its new OpenSocial-based application platform called InApps – an answer to the platforms found on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but without the clutter and ‘junk’ apps that plague those sites. Unlike most other social networks, LinkedIn apps must go through an approval process before they will go live on the store, and all apps must be deemed ‘professional’ in purpose to appear on the business-oriented social network. To prevent an overwhelming amount of clutter, users will be restricted to including a maximum of 15 applications on their main profile pages, though they will eventually have the option to install more apps on a separate page.”
AOL and General Motors Partner on Auto Channel: “AOL has partnered with General Motors to launch a channel within AOL Money & Finance geared for small businesses who are grappling with costly auto-related expenses.
The new section, dubbed Small Business Autos (smallbusiness.aol.com/business-auto-center) features tips and tools for businesses seeking auto loans and lower cost fuel options. Among the site’s initial headlines are ‘Deducting Car Expenses’ and ‘Maximize Your Office on Wheels.’ Also included is Mapquest’s gas prices tool, which helps travelers and businesses find the best gas prices in a given geographical area.”
In many ways, this is a smart play for both companies as they look for more long term growth and results from the direct online (and pre-qualified) traffic searching for problem solving measures in an economic downturn.
The question I have is how or whether AOL will leverage its buy.at affiliate platform in conjunction with this partnership.
LinkShare is making good use of its new blog with the announcement of a series of upcoming publisher training web seminars:
Publisher Training Web Seminars | LinkShare Blog: “LinkShare now offers interactive web seminars for our Publishers. These sessions will cover Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced level training to help you make the most of your LinkShare partnership.”
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, or LinkShare, this could really be a helpful series. Or if you’re an old hack and familiar with their “1.0” interface but still have some questions over the new interface that was implemented earlier this year (like I do), this could be a big help.
I’ll try to listen in on a few of these and report back here.
YouTube has passed Yahoo to become the #2 search engine…
TG Daily – YouTube surpasses Yahoo as world’s #2 search engine: “ComScore’s most U.S. search engine Rankings for August 2008 suggest that YouTube achieves a greater level of search traffic than Yahoo. If you were to consider YouTube’s integrated search a regular search engine, you would have to hand Google the top two spots for search engine traffic. In combination, Google has about four times the search traffic of Yahoo and more than ten times the search traffic of Microsoft’s MSN sites.”
2) Affiliates need to be making sure that their video endeavors are viewer and keyword friendly. In other words, although it is great to load up your videos with highly sought after terms, you also need to make your video enjoyable, memorable and personable. Are you not that interesting? Hire someone or start reading blogs about marketers using video (like Jim Kukral‘s).
3) Think outside the text paradigm and implement (YouTube hosted) video anywhere you can in your affiliate campaigns.
I know affiliate marketers who spend tens of thousands of dollars a day on Yahoo and MSN, which are now behind YouTube in terms of search volume. You might not have thousands of dollars to spend on search, but you do have the time and creativity to make good (and even viral) videos. Be creative and explore. You never know what will catch on.
In an email to affiliates / publishers this week, LinkShare’s co-Presidents (seems to be a popular trend with affiliate networks these days) laid out their plans to address the past downtimes and what the network is doing to head off any possible troubles during the holiday rush.
Even though this holiday shopping season is not expected to set record amounts of sells by any means, the November to January time frame normally is the boom time for affiliates and online merchants (especially in terms of retail merchants).
The full email is below…
Dear Valued Partners:
At this busy time of year for all of us, we wanted to take a moment to update you with some important information on how LinkShare is prepared to handle the expected increase in transaction volume in November and December.
Over the past several months we have experienced intermittent challenges with the performance and presentation of data in our reporting systems. First, we want to say thank you for your patience and your understanding as we have worked through these issues. Second, we want to emphasize that our core capability to capture and track clicks and transactions continues to be the most robust and precise in the industry.
We are happy to report that we have made great strides in all areas. Here is a summary of our current progress:
Account Access
We recently identified and resolved a database problem that was preventing user access to our systems during peak usage times. Since implementing and monitoring this fix last week, we are confident that prolonged, unannounced downtimes are unlikely.
Data Quality
The intermittent downtime we were experiencing contributed in many cases to inconsistent data in our reporting systems. The interruption in sequence and flow of data from the main database (MainDB) to our reporting servers created a lag in the system’s ability to present the most up-to-date information. Now that data access issues have been resolved many of the reporting issues will also be resolved.
However, there are currently some infrequent, yet persistent inconsistencies in the data in SynergyAnalytics that we are investigating. We are also improving the performance of Traditional Reporting and working to resolve remaining data inconsistencies. We expect to make swift progress in these areas in the coming weeks.
Investing in the Future
Over the last 10 months, we’ve made significant investments in our systems. We have replaced our data center networks, reinforced our database systems, upgraded our ad and click servers, assigned additional servers to existing services to allow for increased capacity and automated fail-over, and installed a new software system to monitor and report on performance. These investments have prepared us to handle not only the additional load we expect in November and December, but well into the future.
In our effort to be as transparent as possible, we want to make you aware of some upcoming scheduled maintenance windows over the next few weeks:
Thursday, November 6, 2008 5:00pm – 8:00pm EST (GMT-5) – The last scheduled software release of the year.
On behalf of the entire team at LinkShare, we truly appreciate your business and your patience. We look forward to building even stronger partnerships and wish you strong sales during the 2008 holiday season.
AOL’s integration of its services into the Platform-A advertising operation continues as it is now combining the recently acquired Goowy widget application with its buy.at affiliate network (itself acquired last year).
This is a big deal for a couple of reasons. First, this opens up affiliate marketing, in earnest, to the social web. Affiliate marketing has traditionally been restricted to the realm of static sites and blogs because of limited tracking technology and creatives. However, this widget play changes the game.
For example, Ticketmaster.com is the first buy.at advertiser to work with Platform-A in developing and distributing this new affiliate feature. The widget, called “EventEngine,” can be tailored to promote specific Ticketmaster events. All ticket purchases that originate from Ticketmaster’s widget are credited to the buy.at affiliate network publisher.
Once a publisher places a widget on their website, anyone (including the publisher) can grab that widget and place it on various locations on the Web, including social networks, desktops and blogs. The original publisher earns revenue for each sale driven by the widget.
Secondly, this makes sense for advertisers. Ticketmaster’s example with EventEngine shows that widgets can and will transform the online advertising and marketing landscape in the coming years by leveraging the best of the social web and performance marketing. In many ways, this is the type of solution that many of us have been calling for, and it is great to see an ad or affiliate network finally answering the call.
At the Affiliate Summit West event in Las Vegas in January, the Sunday “Meet Market” took on a whole new dimension. Rather than a cavernous room with sparsely attended tables and a disinterested audience, the the Vegas event launched a Meet Market that was packed and full of considerable buzz about the affiliate industry.
Hopes were high for this week’s Affiliate Summit East Meet Market. And, ASE did not disappoint…
The room in which the Meet Market took place was absolutely packed and every table was surrounded by interested participants.
What makes the Sunday Meet Market different from having a booth in the main exhibition hall on Monday and Tuesday? I asked that question to a number of attendees and most expressed (both on the exhibitor and non-exhibitor side) that the Meet Market allows for more intimacy than having a full fledged booth. Plus, the event happens on the “first” day of the show (even though many attendees are flying in on Friday and early Saturday in order to take advantage of the networking opportunities then), so there is an excited energy that runs throughout the crowded room.
While there are certainly benefits to having a booth (branding, affiliate recruitment, a space to work deals and a way to get your message out), the Meet Market is quickly becoming a can’t miss event at the Summit.
Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: “This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social Software at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003
Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software …there’s a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I’ve seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: ‘A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.’ “
Something to think about as we trounce forward through the murky and undrained swamp of large scale social technologies (especially as marketers)…
For people like Scott Jangro that are fans of the Disqus API plugin (instead of the Javascript one that has all the fancy features), there’s an update according to Disqus’ Daniel Ha (Disqus being the commenting platform used here and on numerous other sites):
twitter: danielha: If you use the API version of the Disqus WP plugin, we’ve released an interim version with a few updates. Get it here http://snurl.com/2tkt5
I’d love to see the API plugin become as full featured as the Javascript plugin and would probably make the switch if/when that happens. Until then, I’m sticking with the features.
Amazon has a nifty new video solution that allows you to embed product links based on what you’re talking about in videos you are hopefully making. At the end of the video, the featured products are then shown in a list with prices and ratings.
It’s pretty straightforward and the video demo does a good job of explaining the new feature.
Be warned that if you watch from 2:04 onwards, your eyes will bleed.
Kowabunga! to Divest Several Non-Core Business Units: “The Company intends to focus its efforts on its Network and other interactive businesses which have potential for enhanced growth. The business units that are no longer considered critical to its long term strategy and identified for divestiture are: (1) Cherish Inc., which provides online personals services; (2) MarketSmart Advertising Inc., which provides traditional offline advertising services; and (3) iLead Media, LLC, which provides online lead generation and digital marketing services. Proceeds from the sales will be used to reduce indebtedness and to fund the expected continued growth of the Network segment. “
The company’s stock price has been on the slide since a high of around $6 in 2004 and around $3.50 in 2007.
Kowabunga! has a soft spot in many people’s hearts in the industry (I was a consultant there for a few months) as we remember the “good old days” so hopefully the ship will turn around with this divestment.
Once Nearly Invisible To Search Engines, Flash Files Can Now Be Found And Indexed: “Adobe has come up with a way for the search engines to read SWF files and index all of the information they contain. That means any text or links in a Flash application can now be indexed. This is a huge step forward for Adobe and anyone who develops in Flash/Flex. Michele Turner, Adobe’s VP of marketing for its platform business, explains:
We are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo that enables them to crawl and index SWF files. They are now searchable. This will open up millions of Flash files to search.
Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them. “
For sites such as Seesmic which rely heavily on a Flash interface, this is great news SEO wise. While I’m not a fan of the mostly Flash pages (like those that seemed to be the front-end of every DirectTrack CPA network in 2005), a little Flash can engage the viewer/user and turn their stay into a longer one.
Regardless, as Jim Kukral says… start doing video and tagging it properly if you want to have a future online.
I saw a few tweets coming in and then Jangro posted the press release… I’m still trying to grok this (that word is acceptable here) but will share some thoughts soon.
We are pleased to introduce Google Affiliate Network . Effective Monday, June 30, 2008, DoubleClick Performics Affiliate will operate as Google Affiliate Network. The integration with Google’s brand is a reflection of efforts to quickly assimilate our business and teams, as well as reinforce Google’s commitment to the Affiliate channel. Together with our new colleagues at Google we are creating new opportunities for monetization, expansion and innovation in Affiliate Marketing.
Within the next couple of weeks you will see some exciting changes to the user interface reflecting the new brand. The platform will continue to be hosted at www.ConnectCommerce.com, but will eventually migrate to a google.com product url.
As noted in earlier communications, DoubleClick Performics’ Search operations are being spun off and sold to a third party. While many advertisers have relationships with both DoubleClick Performics’ Affiliate and Search, there have always been separate account teams and product-specific specialists servicing clients’ search and affiliate programs. These teams remain intact. While the formal separation will occur when the Search business is sold, the businesses are functionally separate today.
We are proud of what we achieved as Performics and this name change signals a new milestone. Google provides world-class resources and enables us to continue to attract the best talent to support our advertisers and publishers. Now as part of Google we have an exciting and unprecedented opportunity to advance our industry. We remain committed to ensuring you receive the quality service you have come to expect from us.
We appreciate your business and look forward to doing great things together.
Sincerely,
Chris Henger
Group Product Manager
Google Affiliate Network
Validation? Market consolidation? Same old same old? Industry clean up due to the invisible hand of the free market?
I noticed from one of brianlittleton‘s tweets that ShareASale is putting together an “open source” PPC policy creation template…
Open Source the PPC Policy Creation – ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum: “One of the things that we will be doing is providing a list of things that a Merchant should and must consider when generating a ‘good’ PPC policy. For example, some Merchants consider things like their ‘domain name’, or ‘TM’, but don’t consider that same word in conjunction with another term such as ‘special’ or ‘vs. a competitor’ …
So – I am here offering and asking for a collaborative effort to generate a template/wishlist/helpsheet for Merchants who want to generate a policy.”
Lots of great stuff going on in that thread at ABW and it’s awesome to see a network reaching out to both affiliates and merchants in such a manner. Go over and participate if you have thoughts on the issue (and who doesn’t?!).
Yes, she did say it. Evidently it went over pretty flat. More people need to listen to GeekCast, dammit!
Congrats again to Lisa AND Jangro. My wife thinks Scott is my most normal “internet friend” if that means anything (which it does). We give you lots of heck on the show, Jangro… but we do love you and you’ll always be the fifth Beatle in my book.
Just this morning, I was in bed watching my favorite program on TV (and about the only thing I watch on TV these days), MSNBC’s Morning Joe. There was a fascinating exchange between show pundit Pat Buchanan and economist Jeffrey Sachs on the topic of energy independence and offshore drilling. Sachs fired back against Buchanan’s typical conservatism (and nativism) with clear and coherent points about the future of energy production and our planet.
At the end of the segment, Joe Scarborough mentioned Sachs’ new book, Commonwealth. I knew then that I had to have it. So, I reached over to the bedside, grabbed my Kindle and about a minute later I was reading the book on the same device that I had read half of another book just a few hours ago.
So, I was happy to see that Seth Godin had written about his experiences with the Kindle since getting one a couple of months ago. Thanks to Jim Kukral for sending that link over.
Seth’s Blog: Random thoughts about the Kindle: “Two months ago, I got a Kindle. It’s a fascinating device, unlike almost any other launched by a significant tech company. Here’s why:”
The only part I disagree on is the “Kindle is a woman’s device” part because most of the top selling Kindle books are on an Oprah list and non-techy. The same can be said for the NY Times Top 10 list (or any top 10 book selling list). Heck, I’m a geek and I don’t read tech or business books. There are plenty of history and political books in the Kindle’s top sellers list which traditionally skew male as well.
Head over and read his thoughts. You just might want a Kindle yourself.
Our long international blogging conundrum is over.
Disqus FTW!
Disqus Blog » New: Enable Support for Trackbacks in Disqus: “Go to the Configure tab and scroll down to General Settings. Check the box and let it do its thing. This is our support for standard Trackbacks. More fun Linkback implementations still to come.”
However, this only works for the JS plugin, not the API plugin. Sorry, Jangro (seriously, head over to Jangro’s blog to see why that matters to some).
We talked about Spore on GeekCast today because the Spore Creature Creator was released.
How will you create the universe?
With Spore you can nurture your creature through five stages of evolution: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space. Or if you prefer, spend as much time as you like making creatures, vehicles, buildings and spaceships with Spore’s unique Creator tools.
CREATE Your Universe from Microscopic to Macrocosmic – From tide pool amoebas to thriving civilizations to intergalactic starships, everything is in your hands.
EVOLVE Your Creature through Five Stages – It’s survival of the funnest as your choices reverberate through generations and ultimately decide the fate of your civilization.
EXPLORE your world and beyond – Will you rule, or will your beloved planet be blasted to smithereens by a superior alien race?
SHARE with the World – Everything you make is shared with other players and vice versa, providing tons of cool creatures to meet and new places to visit.
So, I spent some time creating a creature tonight (just a few mins, I promise). First impressions is that this is going to be a wildly successful hit. Why? Incredible game design/feel and incredibly smart marketing. We’re talking original Doom style viral stuff that is going to make this game a runaway.
You can grab pictures, avatars and videos of your creature as you go through the game. There’s even an “upload to YouTube” function right in the game. Brilliant. You can see a short vid I did of my creature above as an example. And there’s even a dedicated site called SporeVote integrated into the game for fan votes on their favorite created creatures.
On your harddrive, everything is kept nicely in a folder that is created within the Documents section (on a Mac… not sure how that works on PCs):
All in all, I’m highly impressed. Of course, this is going to be a big “time waster” but isn’t that what all games are for? I can’t tell you how much time I “wasted” on Sim City (who shares its creator with Spore), but I look back on fondness at those times.
Can’t wait until the full game is released in September.
