Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 50: #ASW11 Recap
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Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A couple of hyper-caffeinated affiliate marketers (Mike Buechele) and (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!
It’s been a couple of weeks since Affiliate Summit West 2011 was over & done with, and it’s taken us this long to recuperate, follow up with all our leads, jot our ideas for improvement down in notebooks and on whiteboards, and had the time to breathe and record our recap! We had different experiences at this show than some of the others in the recent past, so we share it all with you in a super sized episode this week. For 1 hour & 14 minutes we babble on about:
- Saturday pre-registration ease & the lightly sponsored conference tote bag.
- The short, but sweet, buy.at party and the drinks, view, and having to interact with the “public”. And a brief insight into Trisha’s bath.
- The packed sessions, Mike’s session went well, and our Sunday in meetings and the insanity of the Meet Market.
- Elvis costumes, Marilyn Monroe impersonators, and legend Warren Moon.
- The lovely ShareASale 10 year anniversary party & the Strike Out Breast Cancer bowling party.
- Our quick review of the Drew Eric Whitman keynote, yet neither of us attended the Brian Solis presentation.
- Mike finally met Lewis Howes & they talked about Lewis’ book, LinkedWorking: Generating Success on LinkedIn the Worlds Largest Professional Networking Website
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- Affiliate Summit Forum is now live, so go sign up!
Want to catch up with us & ask questions for the next show? Find us on Twitter: @AMF_Podcast, @MikeBuechele & @TrishaLyn. Like us on Facebook! Leave us a comment!
Special thanks to GeekCast.fm for hosting Affiliate Marketing Fanatics.
Read MoreSocial Email Marketing: Concept of Email Social Media #SMMSF
This session was the keynote for the Social Email Marketing event, put on by Influence People with lead sponsor Constant Contact. The conference took place on Friday, September 17, 2010 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, CA. Unfortunately, I was a bit late and didn’t hear all of what Brian had to say, which is a shame. I know that he’s incredibly knowledgeable on this topic and I’ve heard him speak before and it was a treat. I did manage to take some notes for you though.
- Brian Solis, Principal, Futureworks (@BrianSolis)
Bullet Point Review!
- Content Context is King
- 1+1= Many
- Remember that ROI doesn’t mean Return on Ignorance.
- KISS = Keep it Simple Significant, Stupid & Sharable.
- You have to have a desired outcome and it has to be sharable.
- The new messaging value system:
- Connection
- Empathy
- Conversation
- Engagement
- Listening
- Adaptation
Overall, I wish I had more! But I have much more from the other speakers of that day. Stay tuned! Here’s Brian’s slide presentation:
Social Media Marketing Summit: Brian Solis
As promised, I will deliver with more notes from the Social Media: The Marketing Summit conference. This was the second talk of the conference promising to tell attendees why social media is the new and much better PR and how to garner attention and then make the most of it. The featured speaker was:
- Brian Solis, Founder and CEO, FutureWorks
I’ve heard of Brian previously and had the pleasure of meeting him upon my arrival at the summit Wednesday morning. Incredibly nice guy – I later found out through Twitter that it was his anniversary and he’d still agreed to come talk! And it was a great lesson on social media as public relations.
Brian shared some pretty well-known charts he’s created, which we even mentioned in our panel as well since they’re so provocative.
Bullet Point Review!
- PR people are the most popular at any company.
- Social media is like a renaissance of sorts.
- Markets are conversations, participation is marketing.
- We can’t control the message anymore.
- We miss what we’re not part of.
- One -> One and Many -> Many are important communication concepts to use in social media.
- Something to think about: how do you define influence?
- There are 120,000 new blogs started every day (I believe the source was Technorati).
- Social media is not just blogger relations.
- PR is not about top down anything anymore.
- Old metrics no longer ally with the new web.
- Something to think about: are you an evangelist or a consultant?
- Are you confined to the role of a social marketer or do you represent something with long term value?
- This is about public relations – remember that!
- Everyone feels like they’re an expert about something.
- Social media creates a new hybrid of PR professionals.
- We become influencers.
- Understand how to match people to products.
- There are 3 sides to every story – what you want to say, what people want to hear, and the truth somewhere in the middle.
- People = viral.
- No social media is rooted in broadcast, 1 way streams, or blasts.
- Who owns this channel? Sometimes it’s advertising, PR, marketing, customer service.
- It requires a champion internally, but it’s really everyone’s responsibility.
- It’s the listening that separates experts from the theorists.
- People become pseudo-sociologists – each community is radically different.
- Chart your social media.
- Identify ways to deliver value.
- It’s about conversations not messages.
- Cultivate relationships.
- Remember you’re speaking with people, not an audience.
- DO NOT jump in and start pushing a message or shilling.
- DO NOT SPAM.
- DO NOT fake it.
- Remember that social media requires daily participation.
- Interactive marketing is starting to seriously clash with traditional advertising.
- PR is contending with outsourced relationship managers.
- Web marketers are grappling with digital content creators.
- PR is no longer defined by hits.
- For every bit of information you push out, the higher your authority as an expert becomes.
- Conversations are traceable.
- Social media is not the final frontier – this is just the beginning.
- The semantic web is around the corner.
- Social media is a means, not an end, and is a lesson.
- Being human vs. humanizing your story.
- Either you’re an employee or you’re an evangelist.
- All your social media efforts work back to building your personal brand.
- Respect the community and it will respect you.
- Companies will earn the relationships they deserve within social media.
Points brought up during the Q&A
How did you decide where you need to be? Looked at keywords, thought leading people’s names to see where they were, there are tools to show metrics.- When asking some major brands why they got into social media, they just said they felt like they needed to be there. When asking them how they track they said “We don’t.” which is cool but scary at the same time.
- There is math you can do to see where or how deeply to participate. Look up your brand + sucks to see the suck factor and use that to gauge your success.
- What do you look for in hiring a community manager? They vary, the ones who really understand social web are very expensive. Use the social media tools to find them – put out a tweet, use LinkedIn.
Great stuff that helped to set some of the high level concepts on social media for the relative newbies in attendance and people who really had the questions on how to make social media work for their business. I’ve seen lots of people talk about how powerful social media is, but this was very related to make it really work well for your brand and company. Great job!
Read MoreSocial Media: The Marketing Summit Day 1
Day 1 has concluded with some great after hours discussion for the Social Media: The Marketing Summit at Moscone Center West in San Francisco, presented by mThink. A day full of good pannels on various aspects of social media, including the panel with myself, Brian Caldwell, and Celine Takatsuno on the affiliate channel and how social media applies.
Unfortunately due to some public transportation issues, I didn’t make it on time for the first half of today’s keynote by Charlene Li of Altimiter Group, co-author of Groundswell. What I did hear was some key insight, and I look forward to finding some notes on fellow attendee’s blogs!
Brian Solis delivered with some great words of wisdom that were highly sought after (the slides of them, anyway) after the session. He had some really good actionable items in terms of creating a social media plan and allocating time and efforts that the attendees were really intrigued by. I definitely want a copy to assist with my own understanding of social media planning!
I met with my co-panelists through the Ticketmaster brand highlight so unfortunately I missed that talk, then noshed, then came our panel. I thought we did pretty well, and for my first more traditional speaking engagement. I got some good feedback on the panel, including some nice tweets:
@shelisreal – @briancaldwell, Celine Takatsuno & Trisha Fawver are talking about SM & affiliate mktng. Not my fav topic, but these guys are pretty good.
@lornali – @briancaldwell with Trisha Fawver & Celine Takatsuno on social media & affiliate marketing
@TTaxChristine – @TrishaLyn enjoying your discussion of the tie between affiliates and social media. #SMMW08
After our panel were the fellows from Best Buy responsible for their internal social network Blue Shirt Nation, who were a blast to hear from. There was also a panel on segmentation that I didn’t actually think was that great, and finally a presentation by Karl Long from Nokia on making your customers work for you using social media – great stuff.
Of course, i’ll post my notes as always in coming posts, but I’m jazzed to attend tomorrow’s sessions and soak up the social media goodness like a sponge!
Read MoreSocial Media: The Marketing Summit
That’s right all you conference junkies, there’s a new kid at school. From the people who bring you Revenue Magazine, Social Media: The Marketing Summit will be taking place locally here in October. Some of the brightest folks in social media will be there:
- Lisa Picarille, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Revenue Magazine
- Brian Solis, Principal, FutureWorks and PR2.0
- Charlene Li, Independent Analyst (formerly of Forrester Research)
- Tara Hunt, Co-Founder, Citizen Agency
- Chris Trayhorn, Founder & CEO, PERFORM and Montgomery Research
I’m excited that there’s a new conference on the block, especially one that’s close enough to just commute to! Unfortunately I won’t be able to afford this on my own and, given my recent changes at work, don’t think the company will send me.
Early bird pricing ends August 30th. The early bird price is $895, a whopping $400 savings! As well, I’m officially taking sponsors if someone wants to send me on their behalf. No travel expenses, just the registration of the conference itself. If you’re interested in being my BFF, contact me.
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