I hate to say it, but I feel like I’ve been slacking on this blog for some time now.  Ever since the beginning of October after my whirlwind trips to CJU, BlogWorldExpo, and then the Social Media Marketing Summit and the notes I was able to post from there, I’ve kinda let things go into auto-pilot, with only a few really good posts that were original content.

I also tried to work on a new blog, Beach Front Office, a chronicle of working at home and telecommuting.  However, I’m not so sure if I should be separating that information into a new blog or including it into this one.  My original intent for TrishaLyn.com was to be a whimsical look at marketing and my career as a young woman.  I feel like I really do have a unique take on most things as I am learning as I go and don’t have a marketing degree – just a theatre arts dramatic writing one.  So, I ask of those kind readers – which would you prefer?  I keep my work at home stuff separate at BFO, or integrate it here into my whole experience as a young woman in Affiliate Marketing who telecommutes?  Any opinions are welcome!

All that said, I feel better!  And here’s a recap of some of the more interesting articles around the blogosphere that I read this week.

• Lisa Barone live blogged the Effective Affiliate Strategies session at PubCon this week.  Good notes!
• Another take on PubCon from an affiliate standpoint was the faithful Shawn Collins with his PubCon 2008 Recap. I’m sure either Manda or Brandy will post a recap of their PubCon experience once they get back to Texas next week.
• For my blogger buddies out there, DailyBlogTips posted a handy article 50 Simple Ways to Gain RSS Subscribers.  I need to work on this myself, I admit.
• Black Ink Project 2.0 is now available for the low price of $97.
• Back to Lisa Barone, she also posted a recap of her entire PubCon Liveblogging Coverage.

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As an excellent last minute addition, Karl Long wasn’t in the schedule for the summit and delayed the release of attendees to the reception cocktail party, but it was well worth it!  I thoroughly enjoyed his presentation, titled “Employing Your Customers for Fun and Profit”, and had the pleasure of having an interesting conversation with him and some other attendees during the reception party.  So, without further ado, the presenter was:

• Karl Long, Product Manager OVI/Games, Nokia

This session was basically about utilizing social media to get your customers involved to the point where they’re even working for you!

Bullet Point Review!

• Social media is an engine in which to create value.
• Modern marketing theory comes from the last 50 years.
• Companies tend to focus on one motivation – to purchase.
• Tool: trendwatching.com
• Telling people to “pass it on” is a bit insulting to your customer’s intelligence.
• Employ your customers – have them help you create value in a very web 2.0 way.
• Make it easy to join and easy to get better.
• Reward the right behaviors.
• Recognize top performers.
• Allow exchanges.
• Provide rich feedback.
• Experiment.  Fail.  Learn.
• Now’s the time to fail – fail fast so you can succeed sooner.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• If a company can’t survive, do they warrant survival?  Some people see this as a threat – people woill eventually accept it and adopt it, like the internet in general.
• Are there companies that shouldn’t participate in social media?  If you can’t handle transparency, don’t do it.
• How do you convince your company to spend money to fail?  You have to foster the culture to experiment, it’s cheap to try anything with social media.
• Any strategy that relies on containment will fail.
• No walled garden will succeed (Blue Shirt Nation-type internal networks aside)

All in all it was a relevant and humorous presentation by Karl that really deserved better billing!  Check out his blogs at ExperienceCurve.com and Tcritic.com.

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This session took place October 1st and promised to teach those in attendance how marketers can reach very specific groups of users via behavioral targeting, niche social sites, campaigns at specific demographics, hyper targeting and more.  The panel consisted of:

• Chris Saad, Founder and CEO, DataPortability.org
• Will Moss, CEO, ConnectPlatform.com
• Ian Swanson, Founder and CEO, Sometrics

To be honest I didn’t like the unorganized nature the panelists took, but there were some decent take-home notes to be had from the session.

Bullet Point Review!

• Methods to find a niche are Google Search and Twitter Search.
• Don’t just observe, participate.
• Lots of people started with apps and then moved to a main web property.
• Find your audience – use demographics, psychographics, behavioral marketing – find them and partner up.
• Partner with fast growing niche networks or create one if it doesn’t exist yet in the niche you’re interested in.
• Experiment with creative ads with the owners of these networks.
• Advertising is yelling, marketing is having a conversation.
• Learn the social contract and participate accordingly.
• Have a process in place on how to respond and join the conversation.
• Put your money where your mouth is and allocate resources to monitor and respond in social media settings.
• There is a need for a new metric.  Keywords used to tell people, not so much anymore.
• Need for interests to be measured (APML).
• How do you target?  Try – do sample buys, experiment, do lots of little buys.
• Social networks are still cheap to advertise on because they don’t yet perform like traditional ad buys in terms of CPM.
• See what keywords people associate with your brand (quality, sucks, etc).
• Use social networking for lead generation.
• No one’s talking about your product, they’re talking about your brand – so collaborate and build a product that they’ll want to talk about.
• Use social media to saturate a niche market; brainstorm about communities of interest and participate and show your subject matter expertise.
• Use search engines to find individuals and follow them back to their communities.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• You might want to go local before going national – not all products and services scale effectively to a national audience.
• Widgets are the bumper sticker of the web.
• Develop content and specific tags (zip codes, city names, etc.) in targeting.
• Get analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.
• Keyword ads like AdWords, Facebook, MySpace are great for segmentation.
• Hyper targeting is growing in adoption.
• Open Social – create widgets that will work across multiple social networks.
• If you’re going to buy advertising on a social network, you should also participate in that network.
• Be part of that eco system in as many ways as possible.
• Using engagement to see how well ads work can also be used to see what a particular segment is interested in (e.g. how many people mouse over, click, etc.)
• Data portability will break down barriers to entry.
• Using a 3rd party metric contrasts vs. internal and lends credibility and gives you a comparison of you vs. your competitors.

Even the Q&A portion was just an extension of the session, so it was hard to really distinguish what people were asking.  It was a decent session but could have been perked up with a bit more empirical data and maybe some real-world experiences.

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