Day 3 of Affiliate Summit West 2010
Thursday
Jan 28, 2010
Tuesday January 19th
The final day of Affiliate Summit started bright and early with the Pinnacle Awards scheduled before the last day’s keynote by Brian Clark. This was a change for the conference agenda, which usually puts the Pinnacle Awards in the afternoon after other sessions. I like the change because it gets the awards out of the way, and didn’t interfere with any other sessions or independent parties planned in the evening. I seem to remember last year that some of the award winners had to jet quickly after the awards to get to a charity poker tournament, among other places.
The winners have been blogged all over, but here’s a quick recap just in case this is the only blog you read (unlikely): Affiliate of the Year – Nicholas Koscianski. Affiliate Manager of the Year – Matt McWilliams. Exceptional Merchant – eBay Partner Network. Affiliate Marketing Advocate – Angel Djambazov. Best Bloggger – Jeremy Schoemaker. Affiliate Marketing Legend – Scott Jangro.
Next up was Brian Clark’s keynote. He admitted at the beginning that it was his first keynote, so I guess he did pretty well all things considered. Of course, I have a whole post devoted to the keynote that I’ll go into later.
Once again, I intended to go into more sessions on Tuesday, but got sidetracked with all the networking possibilities. As well, I was given a demo of a new affiliate network of sorts, Impact Radius. It gives merchants and affiliates a way to also reach out and work with more traditional media partners. I had an opportunity to interview one of the founders, Lisa Riolo, about the launch of the new network, which will also be another blog post coming up soon.
I made it a point to get to Jim Kukral’s session How To Get Motivated For Success!, which I’ll of course be posting a recap for. It was a great kick in the pants to get going with projects that have been stalled for awhile. I know Eric Nagel wrote an entire post about Jim’s kick in the ass.
While in Jim’s session, I heard via Twitter that Daniel M. Clark of Geek Dads Weekly was invited to speak on the GeekCast.fm Live panel. I was bummed since I wanted to participate with that panel/group like I did at Affiliate Summit East 2009, but happy for Daniel. I went into the session for a moment, but left in favor of running back up to my room for a few things. As I understand, the session was some industry talk followed up with a lot of “how to podcast” type questions, so it looks like I personally didn’t miss much information that I didn’t already know.
The evening ended with a fail on the part of the Rio. A BlogUp mixer was planned at the VooDoo Lounge, which was official and everything, not just 100 people crashing the lounge for a mixer. Unfortunately, it was raining and since the lounge has an indoor and an outdoor area, the lounge ended up double booked with another much larger group of people. So we tried cramming into the bar at the steakhouse for awhile, overwhelming the poor bartender on duty. Finally, the Rio moved the charade down to the iBar and served complimentary champagne as a mea culpa.
I stayed for awhile, the it was on to another Las Vegas tradition – the buffet! A large group of us went to the Carnival World Buffet at the Rio, one of my favorite buffets ever. Then again, I haven’t been to many. It was good times and good food with good people – one of my favorite activities! After dinner, I went and hung out with Heather Smith & Julie Vazquez, who were still at the iBar. Had a very pleasant last night of Affiliate Summit West 2010!
Twitter Lists & Vanity
Thursday
Nov 26, 2009
Twitter lists seem to be the greatest thing since sliced bread lately. I have to say that I do love them. I read a post by my former lovely co-worker Manda Otto about what lists she’s on. I have to admit that got me thinking and wondering what lists I’m on. Vanity, and all. So I looked it up.
28 Listed… Pretty Sweet!
- @mcbrundage/affiliate
- @startpoken/poken-fans
- @Route53/affiliatefriends
- @Garth_OBrien/social-media
- @stefaniehutson/internet-marketing-women
- @Happy213/viewaskew
- @LisaP/affiliatemarketing
- @LisaP/coolsfpeeps
- @FredericPrigent/affiliation
- @JudiM/marketingwork
- @karengarcia/affiliate-marketing
- @CRschilliger/etc
- @LindaSherman/geeky-girls-to-love
- @latenitecoder/affiliatebiz
- @jangro/affiliatorati
- @danielmclark/geekcast-fm-podcasters
- @sharonmostyn/amazing-affiliate
- @Rexanne/affiliate-marketing
- @MarketLeverage/friends-and-fans
- @brettbum/affiliateindustryinsiders
- @jgoode/affiliate-pals
- @toddfarmer/affiliate-marketing
- @TFNDina/orlando
- @TFNDina/too-awesome-for-titles
- @nikkixbee/irl
- @nikkixbee/friends
- @drcool73/awesome-affiliate-people
- @angies91/affiliate-marketing
So let’s examine the stats… 14 mentions of affiliate… two mentions of awesome, one mention of amazing. As you can tell, I seem to have done a pretty good job branding myself as an affiliate marketing professional. I’m sure I probably reside on more lists that users have chosen to keep private. I think my two favorite are Dina’s “Too Awesome for Titles” and Linda’s “Geeky Girls to Love”. Thanks a lot ladies! Thanks to everyone who thought to toss me onto a list, for that matter. I know that, personally, a lot of my lists are private because I just don’t feel like making them public. I know when Twitter lists came out, I went through my entire list and categorized EVERYONE. And if I didn’t know what category they really belonged in, I cut some. I think this is a great development for Twitter… much better than the new retweet function!
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Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 10: Gonna Make a Change
Friday
Jun 26, 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!
Unfortunately this week we had a mic failure on Mike’s part, so even though I could hear him when we were recording the podcast on Skype, when listening back he was inaudible. I tried amplifying it and leveling it and everything, but it was a lost cause. So instead, we decided I’d give you a recap on what we talked about since they were all pretty important issues. Basically, we’re taking a page from Shawn Collins’ book on podcast failures 
. So the title refers both to all the changes going on with tax rules and disclosure regarding affiliates AND to the change Mike has to make to get the recording right next week!
The recap episode is a short and sweet 26 minutes on the dot since it includes a Jackson tribute at the end.
In this show, we discussed:
- A recap of Affiliate Convention.
- Amazon dropped North Carolina affiliates and sent a warning letter to Rhode Island affiliates. Darren Rowse wrote about it on Problogger.
- The FTC is tightening it’s rules regarding disclosure, but it’s still ambiguous enough to leave affiliates questioning what this means for them. Daniel M. Clark wrote an article on the FTC disclosure issue, as well as Brian Clark of Copyblogger’s wrote about how to turn disclosure into a selling point.
- Twitter servers took a hit yesterday when the news about Michael Jackson’s sudden death broke. Are they ready to be a major search engine?
- Rumors swirled about other celebrity deaths – this doesn’t make Twitter look like a legitimate resource in the eyes of skeptics.
- Finally, Rest in Peace to Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, who both passed away yesterday. We pay tribute to MJ and pontificated on whether or not we’d see affiliates attempting to capitalize on these events. I see just now that Shawn Collins is thinking about this topic as well on his blog.
