Sam Harrelson

We’ve all played with Panama by this point, but yesterday the service launched to the general public (without much fanfare or blogging coverage)…

BURBANK, Calif., Dec 12, 2006 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that its new search marketing platform, known by its code name, Panama, is now available to advertisers that wish to open a new Yahoo! sponsored search account. Beginning today, U.S. businesses of all sizes can sign up online to begin marketing their products and services through Yahoo!’s easy-to-use, completely redesigned system.

Previously, the system was only open to Yahoo!’s existing search marketing customers that wanted to transition from the old system over to the new platform.

Yahoo is slowly moving over all existing search customers to the new platform. Project Panama does seem to be successful in streamlining Yahoo’s search offerings. However, I’m not sure how much of a dent even an improved Yahoo service will cut into AdSense. One contact referred to this as “Yahoo’s Zune compared to Google’s iPod.”

Have you played with Panama yet? Impressions?

During his “Lighting Round” picks last night (December 12), CNBC’s popular stock analyst and personality Jim Cramer included a short quip about two of online advertising’s biggest players…

aQuantive (AQNT): ‘AQNT and VCLK … These are companies that help the digital media transformation.’
ValueClick (VCLK): ‘These are companies that are beneficiaries of the fact that TV and radio and newspapers are losing… they’re winning.’

His comment on Cisco during that same segment was also interesting…

Cisco (CSCO): ‘ They’re best in show.’

I was hoping for more detail from him on his predictions for ValueClick. Their stock continues to soar after a downturn in July. They are attracting more and more attention as online advertising continues to eat into the once hegemonic grip of traditional styles of marketing and show increasing signs of ROI and flexibility.

Could this be signs of a major acquisition in the space in near future?

[Disclosure: I do not own stock in any of the companies above and this is opinionated commentary, not advice on stocks that you should purchase. ]

The Washington Post reports that the FTC is getting involved in the PayPerPost debacle…

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.

In a staff opinion issued yesterday, the consumer protection agency weighed in for the first time on the practice. Though no accurate figures exist on how much money advertisers spend on such marketing, it is quickly becoming a preferred method for reaching consumers who are skeptical of other forms of advertising.

Word-of-mouth marketing can take any form of peer-to-peer communication, such as a post on a Web blog, a MySpace.com page for a movie character, or the comments of a stranger on a bus.

In my opinion, this should be a self-regulating and self-cleaning mechanism built into the world of online marketing. We should have the ability, and the foresight, to see these types of marketing schemes for what they are… manipulation marketing.

However, considering how vocal some “marketers” are about sketchy practices such as AdSense arbitrage, splogs, and the the inability of reason and the common good to control the market for the benefit of everyone, it seems that the FTC has to get involved to reign in the craziness. Pay per content schemes, whether they be explicit or tacit are not healthy for the blogging scheme, and do not provide bloggers and individuals with a long term sustainable way to make a living.

Provide good content, write about what you love and the traffic will come. You don’t need high stakes SEO or short term pay per post schemes to make a dollar, or an impact, in the blogging world.

So what does this mean for affiliate marketing?

Are links dead?

Jason Calacanis’ keynote from this year’s Search Engine Strategies in Chicago is worth a listen or two. Done in an interview style with Danny Sullivan, the keynote has been made famous for it’s “SEO is bullshit” declaration. While that is an interesting point to ponder, some of the other statements Jason made caught my attention as well. For example, near the end he says that his personal motto might be “make it suck less” in terms of internet platforms and programs.

Here’s the link to the interview in mp3 (made available by WebMasterRadio).

Jason got me thinking about my recent launch of CostPerJobs. I’ve put an incredible amount of work into the backend of the site and service, and I hope it shows when the site makes its formal Debutante Ball appearance (I’m from South Carolina where we still have such things).

When the formal interface makes its debut, I want the site to be something useful. I’m not as interested in monetizing the site as many people in the industry tell me I should be, but I’ve often considered job listings and helping connect people or businesses needing quality help with the people in online marketing who could provide that quality as lacking. Having been in the position of trying to find the next forward thinking company from an employee point-of-view, I know that it is lacking.

So, in order to make CostPerJobs suck less (even though you won’t see the completed project until Friday), I’d like for your help/input/insight into the following questions or any other topics you can think of to make this a valuable resource for our community:

• Should I charge a fee for listings or make it a free service?
• What features would you like to see on CostPerJobs (RSS, email subscriptions, keyword searching, etc)?
• Should CostPerJobs look like CostPerNews or should it have its own distinctive appearance and interface?
• How much of a role should automation play?
• How could this site best be utilized for the improvement of our community?

Please share your feedback. I’m not interested in making millions or thousands off of the site, but I do want it to serve as a needed resource in our industry and community.

Come to think of it, use this as a chance to tell me how to make CostPerNews suck less. If there’s something you don’t like about the site, or something you wish was here, don’t hesitate to post it in the comments or send me an email.

Thanks so much!

This is not too surprising in my book judging from the popularity of platforms such as GMail, feed readers, social bookmarking sites and social networks…

Fifty-seven percent of 1,100 surveyed respondents said they would provide demographic information in exchange for a more personalized online experience, and 34 percent of respondents said they would allow sites to track their clicks and purchases.

What do you think?

(Thanks to Jeff Doak for the tip.)

Google blogger Matt Cutts has responded to criticism that Google blatantly ripped off a Yahoo promotion page for the download of IE7 in a blistering detail of how Yahoo has taken liberally from Google’s own AdSense templates in the design of their own promotional ads…

Yup, getting copied without credit can suck. I’m glad that Jeremy was so observant and pointed this out immediately. Google has already changed the page, but I trust Yahoo will be on the lookout for copying in the future.

However, this situation points to something endemic to our current American society based on our cookie-cutter educational institutions which are producing citizens with the skills to know how to cut and paste rather well without the ability to think creatively and critically. This sort of copying occurs more than frequently in affiliate marketing, whether it’s campaign creative, network interfaces or promotional materials. So, let’s all use this as a reason to look at our own programs and discover how we might be able to do something a little differently than how everyone else is doing, whatever your rank in online marketing.

Both of these companies are stocked full of highly intelligent engineers and designers, so let’s all shake hands and go our separate ways making the web more Ajaxy…

Following Anik’s (from AffiliateClassroom.com) lead, I made an ornament out of the thoughtful Season’s Greetings card from Shawn Collins. The making of the ornament involved a scissor hack which modified the card beyond its terms of use, but the placement which the ornament will receive is of much higher quality and traffic than the card would ever get based on all of those other non-relevant contextual cards.

I’ve added the “ornament” to our Harrelson Family Holiday Chair…

And here’s the closeup of the newly added Shawn Collins ornament (along with C3PO)…

Do you send out a Holiday note to your partners? You should. Shawn’s package made my day and as a result I’m subconsciously more willing to do more business with him in 2007. Don’t underestimate the power of the Holiday Card!

And now for the important question…what did YOU do with your Shawn Collins Christmas Package?

My beautiful wife and I are contemplating the idea of having a baby in 2007, so the story of James Kim and his family’s ordeals still brings a river of tears to my eyes, even as I write this post.

My wife is a physician and spends an inordinate amount of time working in the hospital, so when we went out to dinner last Wednesday at our favorite restaurant here in Asheville, she had not heard about the Kim family ordeal and the discovery of James’ body as he was attempting to travel in the bitter cold of an Oregon winter to find help for his family.  As I tried to relate the story to her over our noodles and vegetables, I broke down thinking about one of our own tech-savvy colleagues and the ordeals he and his family must have gone through during those cold and lonely nights stranded in the wilderness.

I’ve been trying to find a way to donate or give something to the Kim family during the Holidays in order that these emotions and feelings of empathy might not go away in vain.  A friend passed along this link to jamesandkati.com.

If you would like to forward on words of hope and encouragement to the Kim and Fleming families please send a note to friendsandfamily@jamesandkati.com and we will gather them up to pass on. Please send an email with your thoughts and prayers. We appreciate all of the thoughts and prayers and will pass along emails to the Kim and Fleming families. We will also be creating a time capsule for the girls, so that in their future they will know what a great man and a hero James was to his family. The capsule will include these emails, examples of James work at TechTV and CNet, and news reports about their dad.

So in the midst of all of our crass commercialization during the Holidays, please consider visiting the site and using the PayPal option to donate funds to the Kim family.  Send along the link and let others know that they can donate to the family there as well.

The Google Strikes Back.

Jason Calacanis spotted this comment from Matt Cutts regarding Google’s detection and devaluation of paidperpost content in Google rankings…

“Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.”

So if you want to keep your prestige (and ranking / rating) with Google, you might want to re-evaluate the use of PayPerPost and ReviewMe type offers.

Some would argue about the issue of fairness, but in the free market economy of the WWW, Google can and should be able to set whatever policies it sees fit being in the dominant share of the market for user trustworthiness.

I suspect Yahoo and MSN do the same with regards to paid content such as PaidPerPost but have been waiting on word from Google to make their own declarations about these emerging platforms.

Video has matured from a realm of amateur user generated content into a platform for compelling online media according to a new whitepaper from Universal McCan and KnowledgeStorm.  Of the 5,300 technology and B2B buyers surveyed in the study, over 60% said that they accessed video on a daily basis for the purpose of business and not entertainment.

“The takeaway of all of these surveys is that we are really in stage two of the opportunity for online marketing and advertising,” said Matt Lohman, KnowledgeStorm’s director of market research. “There is a whole wave of opportunity to extend marketing campaigns and programs via things like blogs, podcasts and various video formats. The sky’s the limit in terms of the ways to be effective on the Internet and really measure results. This stuff is not a fad that’s going away.”

Of the three topics explored in the latest survey, video is making the broadest impact today. More than 63% of respondents access video at least weekly, while the same percentage said they access video primarily for business and technology information?not entertainment. Webcasting was the most commonly accessed form of Web video at 70%, but all sorts of types scored well. Overall, 78.1% of respondents said video “makes online content more compelling,” while 57% said video content had influenced a b-to-b technology buying decision.

I found it interesting that video had such a high rate of adoption in the B2B community already.  In this case, it seems that the B2C community may be behind the B2B crowd in terms of adoption of video as a viable and valuable platform because B2C still seems to be sorting out the evolving and rapidly growing space and trying to determine a proper metric and even place for advertisements on the platform.

Nevertheless, expect for video to blossom in 2007.