Affiliate Marketing Fanatics Episode 3: Twitter in a Tumblr with a splash of Gary Vaynerchuk
Friday
Mar 20, 2009
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A Publisher (Mike Buechele) and an Affiliate Manager (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!
We’ve finally determined that the audio problems were due to my headset this week as I stole the stand alone boom mic from my husband’s computer and the sound is excellent. Third time’s the charm! So now you won’t have to listen to a bad recording for our quality content!
We jumped around a bit today and covered a lot, so this episode is longer than the last two clocking in at about 40 minutes. We talk a lot about Twitter and decided that we live most of our lives through Twitter. We also give some shout outs at the end, as I promised last week.
Show Links:
- TweepMe and the creator’s account being suspended.
- Still getting used to the new Facebook.
- A few more words about Gary Vaynerchuk and his SXSW video.
- WeFollow, a survey about Twitter, and the Twouble with Twitters (careful, the video is on autoplay).
- Sony made a deal with Google to enhance their Sony Reader line up (watch out, Kindle!)
For the sake of driving the point home, I talked more about the grass roots fight going on against California Assembly Bill 178, which is looking to do in California what the so-called Amazon Tax did in New York. Here are some links I mentioned and some from the March 3rd episode of Affiliate Thing:
Cribbed Content for January 30th
Friday
Jan 30, 2009
There wasn’t a large amount of stuff going on this week, but what did go on was big news and somewhat exciting. There’s some important issues going on and some dates to remember.
- Not one, but two keynote speakers have been announced for Affiliate Summit East 2009, August 9-11 in New York City. Social media rockstar Chris Brogan will take the keynote torch during the traditional Monday slot, then Help a Reporter creator Peter Shankman will fill a new keynote spot Tuesday morning. Very cool!
- I haven’t yet had a chance to write a recap myself, so here’s the recap of LinkShare Symposium West from the official LinkShare blog.
- Speaking of LinkShare’s Symposium, they’ve announced the dates for LinkShare Symposium East, including the Golden Link Awards. For some reason it was not announced on their blog or website, but widely reported by other affiliate bloggers like Missy Ward.
- Speaking of affiliate networks, ShareASale has decided to lead a roundtable discussion on toolbars and setting standards to keep them within the ideals and ethics ShareASale has set forth. There’s a lot of backlash about it on ABW, but I think people are jumping the gun – let’s see how the first discussion goes before making a solid judgment.
Affsum Session: Ethical Issues in Affiliate Marketing
Wednesday
Jan 21, 2009
Date: Sunday, January 11th, 2009. Session 3d, 3:00pm.
Session Description: There are two sides to ethical issues in affiliate marketing, and we will entertain audience questions for a panel of industry leaders. The panel consisted of:
- Haiko de Poel Jr., Managing Partner, dp internet services LLC, DBA ABestWeb (Moderator)
- Connie Berg, CEO, FlamingoWorld.com LLC
- Chuck Hamrick, Affiliate Manager, affiliateCREW.com
- Brian Littleton, President/CEO, ShareASale.com
- Alex Butin, Freecause (Alex stood in for Paul Nichols from Ebates, who had to bow out last minute)
With Alex on the panel and the latest big issue facing affiliate ethics being toolbars overwriting affiliate cookies, I think that swayed the tide of the questions asked by both Haiko as moderator and Q&A portion. I would have liked to hear more questions asked by audience members, but admittedly, I didn’t have any to ask myself since I’m still learning about all the different issues that eat at the ethics of the industry.
Bullet Point Review!
- Haiko made a good analogy to Las Vegas and asked: is the soul of the industry gone?
- Online marketing is becoming the default medium for high ROI.
- From your unique vantage point, where do you draw the line?
- Chuck, as an OPM, said: Knowingly doing something that’s unethical. Working with adware and parasites knowing that’s wrong. Allowing PPC tactics you know affect other department’s performance. Being an affiliate of your own program. Playing favorites.
- Connie, as a coupon affiliate, said: Coupon sites that have a toolbar that overwrites other cookies. Auto load cookies. Social media apps. Networks owning competing affiliate sites. As new technology comes out there are new ways to cheat.
- Alex, as a technology provider, said: Be clear with your motives, evolve your business models. It’s up to merchants to decide what’s unethical, as a company they don’t want to create a tool that doesn’t do exactly what it says it does, so they’re not interested in shady features that aren’t advertised.
- Brian, as a network, said: They see “interference” to tracking as a problem period, and since parasites, toolbars, etc. interfere with tracking, they’re out. They’ve also seen a total disregard for other company’s policies (affiliates breaking Google rules was his example) and they have no interest working with those people. Don’t turn the other cheek to practices you know are unethical.
- There’s a whole movement of squeaky clean networks and businesses.
- We need to take charge because the networks won’t.
- People are pushing the term “affiliate” under the rug and re-branding as “performance” marketing. Performance is all inclusive and too broad to represent affiliates.
- Network compliance teams are a joke.
- The industry needs more disclosure and transparency, not division and separation that some organizations are actually providing (seemed to hint at the PMA).
Points brought up during the Q&A
One question asker made the statement that “cookies are dead”, referencing the new browser technology recently coming out that has been blocking affiliate ad displays and blocking cookies. Brian respectfully disagreed with the statement that cookies are dead, but said his network is looking at ways to track without cookies, but couldn’t get into specifics for obvious reasons. Other panelists agreed that the cookie issue isn’t too big yet.- Brook Schaaf asked about the negative thoughts associated with coupon sites, and Connie and the other panelists agreed that “one bad apple spoils the bunch”, so to speak. There are shady coupon sites running toolbars that overwrite cookies, stealing non-affiliate coupon codes from the merchant’s website, and stealing exclusive codes from other affiliates that have given legitimate coupon sites a bad name.
Based solely on the description of this session, I was hoping for more of a discussion, but despite the room being packed, the panel was over 20 minutes early with just two questions asked. I’m glad that it seems they took the feedback from Boston and toned the emotion of the session down a bit, and I hope to see further discussion at future Summits, or perhaps even a jam session type event to just address ethics. It seems like a discussion bigger than an hour long panel can accommodate.
There’s also a recap from Michael Buechele’s point of view on the Affiliate Summit Blog: Affiliate Summit West 2009 Session Recap – Ethical Issues in Affiliate Marketing. Check out a different perspective.
