Category: Social Media

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.

All Traffic is Not Good Traffic

Affiliate Summit published its latest webinar today on the topic of traffic generation. Evan speaks for an hour about how he generates traffic and “fans” organically through search, via social media such as LinkedIn and Facebook, with email and paid search…

10 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Website: “Affiliate Summit ran a free webinar featuring Evan Weber, of online marketing agency Experience Advertising, on 10 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Website, and it’s now available to watch on demand.”

It’s an interesting video for people new to the area of affiliate marketing and Evan does a good job of showing how to get traffic via tried and true techniques that do increase page views.

However, my reminder to advertisers and publishers I work with (especially folks new to the industry) is that not all traffic is good traffic.

For instance, ping.fm is spam (still waiting for the mud fight, Kim). It’s a fantastic tool if you’re looking to broadcast like you’re Dan Rather, but that’s not what the effective media tactic of 2011 looks like and you’re not CBS.

In Evan’s webinar, he makes great use of tools like ping.fm, a Chrome extension for blasting out links to Digg, LinkedIn, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Status.net, Plurk and God knows what else, but most, if not all, of the traffic gained from such blasting will do little to help you conversion numbers and in fact drive the type of dilution that could lead you to make poor choices about ad placements, keyword buys etc.

In other words, this type of traffic generation is great if you’re doing CPM advertising, but CPA and PayPerSale in 2011 requires different strategies based on community growth in the long term.

A much more realistic strategy for effective and sustained traffic and conversions generation is to hyper-focus. Build out the profile of your ideal user. What networks do they use? What things do they search for? What will lead them to your site, make an action on your site and then refer your site to others and come back at least once in the coming three months? What do they look like? Where do they live (don’t be creepy)? What do they wear? What kind of pets do they have? What games do they play? What do they drive? Be obsessive. Sweat the details and do your research.

Take the portfolio of that person you create and work incessantly to sell your story to that person. It’s not easy, but it will pay off. If you get that one person to your site, you’ve made it.

Stop reaching for millions of page views via artificial keyword buys and blasted out social media messages and thousands of indexed pages with forums that no one uses and work to convert that one person that you’ve created.

At least that’s what works for me and why you’re reading this now.

Facebook Like-Jacking and Need for Digital Literacy

Interesting:

Criminals Used Affiliate Marketing Sites in Majority of Facebook Scams in 2011: The vast majority, or nearly 74 percent, of Facebook attacks in 2011 were designed to lead users to fraudulent marketing affiliate and survey sites, the report found.

Affiliate marketing was a “rich source” of income for scammers, according to Amir Lev, CTO of Commtouch.

First, it’s interesting to me that the writer focuses so much on how easy it is for scammers and “criminals” (a conviction is needed to be a criminal… just saying) to use the medium of what he broadly labels as affiliate marketing. The piece focuses more on survey type deals that were so popular with the “free iPod” craze of 2003-4 in the pre-CANSPAM era.

It’s pretty easy for the legitimate businesses he sources as being defrauded to check their logs and any affiliate manager or OPM worth their salt will catch this kind of scam traffic, especially if they are dealing with the lead based side of things in the CPA and lead gen areas.

The real heart of the piece should be about the need for better digital literacy among users of spaces like Facebook (especially if they are browsing on a Windows machine with IE6 or 7).

Cue Wayne Porter…

“For criminals, it was not enough to just trick users, as criminals need to make sure the attacks spread and continue to trap other people, Commtouch said. They were most likely to trick users into sharing the links almost half the time, but also tricked users into copy-pasting malicious code to trigger a cross-site scripting attack or downloading malware. Rogue applications and “like-jacking”—which employs a malicious script on the page to convert any mouse clicks on the page as a “like” that is also visible to other users—were employed in about a third of the scams.

“In 48 percent of the cases, unwitting users themselves are responsible for distributing the undesirable content by clicking on ‘like’ or ‘share’ buttons,” according to Commtouch.”

It’s fascinating to me that many of the conversations Wayne and I were having back in 2008 about a future of social-engineered badware that would find virility through good-willed sharing are coming true in 2011 and even more so into 2012.

At the root of the issue isn’t affiliate marketing or how easy it is to scam businesses. Businesses have failsafes and checks in place to catch these things (ideally). Instead, we need to have more savvy users who realize the implications of sharing or liking a suspect link or article or site.

This sort of manipulation of otherwise trusting, naive or uninformed users of the web will only intensify as more people go on the web with mobiles and tablets in the coming five years.

The Problem with A/B Testing Ads in Social Media

Something to remember as you repeatedly hear “test test test!” and embark on your own split testing for various creatives via Google Analytics etc…

How Not To Run An A/B Test: “Although they seem powerful and convenient, dashboard views of ongoing A/B experiments invite misuse. Any time they are used in conjunction with a manual or automatic “stopping rule,” the resulting significance tests are simply invalid. Until sequential or Bayesian experiment designs are implemented in software, anyone running web experiments should only run experiments where the sample size has been fixed in advance, and stick to that sample size with near-religious discipline.”

Basically, don’t peek at your testing, don’t test for significance and have sample sizes in mind for your tests.

This is insanely important in more emerging areas for creatives like social media or mobile.

This looks like calculus but it’s a good reminder that the observer often influences the test.

Yay science.

via Hacker News

Learn Social Media Marketing in Las Vegas – Day After Affiliate Summit West

WIN a free ticket to Social Media Marketing Las Vegas – all you need to do to Tweet “Win a free ticket to #smlasvegas just after #asw11 Social Media Event in Vegas Jan 12 from @costpernews http://bit.ly/h8I1qr”

If you’re coming for Affiliate Summit West, stay for Social Media Marketing 2011 and escape one more day of whatever it’s like where you live. If you’re lucky, your home airport will be snowed in and you’ll have to stay anyway. It’s only $95 if you register early. (Or show up in swim trunks or a bikini. Just kidding.) Register here use code costpernews for 10% off.

Social Media Marketing 2011 will bring together leading brands and marketing experts to explore the viral power of social networks. Learn how to get coverage like a Lindsay-Lohan-gets-out-of-rehab photo. During this one-day event, a team of marketing experts – like Andrew Dumas, David Koloski and Murray Newlands! – will provide guidance on how to effectively engage with customers via social media, give tips on how to maximize the impact of your campaigns and offer insights into new services to try and trends to watch.

This is the ultimate event for anyone involved in social media or digital marketing.

Bring an extra supply of business cards because you’ll get to network with marketing strategists & directors, PR & communications managers, social media experts, bloggers & journalists.

Who doesn’t want an extra day in Vegas?

Presenters include:
Andrew Dumas – Sharethis
Ron Cates – Constant Contact
Murray Newlands, director of Influence People
Jennifer Neeley Lindsay, host of A-List on BlogTalkRadio
David Koloski, Director of Social Media, Web & Partnership Marketing for Caesar’s Entertainment
Eric Petersen, Manager of Social Marketing Strategy for Caesar’s Entertainment
Raymond Lyle, President of VigLink
Chase McMichael, Co-Founder & CEO of InfiniGraph.com

Sponsors:
Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel and Casino
VigLink
MarketMeSuite
Share This
352 Media Group

Media Partners:
Mashable: the Social Media Guide
Adrants
Ubergizmo
ReadWriteWeb
State of Search
LeadsCon
Bub.Blicio.us

When: 12th January, 9:00am – 5:30pm
Where: Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas
For more info and to register: http://socialmediamarketing.co.uk/lasvegas/ use code costpernews for 10% off.

Guest post by www.murraynewlands.com