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.

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I’ve already talked long ago of how awesome I think Entrecard is.  Any free traffic source is great, let alone a free advertising medium as well.  A couple weeks ago, they got even more awesome in my eyes with the launch of their Entrecard Toolbar.

Similar to what SiteHoppin’ was offering, Entrecard has taken it upon themselves to offer a tool to allow EC users to jump from blog to blog within different categories to see what else is out there – and efficiently drop your EC card to receive credits.  I really enjoy being able to use the “Next Ten Sites” button within the toolbar to have 10 tabs open up in Firefox and be able to wander through them as I desire.

Yes, it’s great for effectively dropping ECs, but I’ve always said that I actually LIKE going around to different blogs and checking out their content, site design, what ads they’re running, etc.  So this serves that purpose as well.

This is a screen shot of my toolbar right now – I just went and spent all my saved EC’s on ads so I’m starting from scratch.  It doesn’t take up a lot of room at all, and offers you different choices of category to browse within and different ways to order the results: Most popular, Newest, Cheapest, Most expensive, Most advertised, and Random.  The final benefit – and best – is that while you’re surfing these blogs the toolbar updates to tell you how many ECs an ad on that site costs, if you already have an advert in the queue for that site, and allows you to purchase adverts by clicking on the button that shows the price.  You can also add the blog to your favorites site by clicking on the heart.

The only downside to the toolbar is that it’s a toolbar.  Sounds weird, I know, but what I mean is that I have two other toolbars and I can’t toggle this one on or off like the StumbleUpon toolbar to save screen space.  This isn’t a problem for me, but currently the toolbar only runs on Firefox 3 as an add-on, so anyone still using Internet Explorer to switching over to Google’s new browser Chrome will have to do things the old fashion way!  This is the first release of the toolbar with a second beta release out now, so hopefully in future releases they’ll address the browser compatibility issue.

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OK it’s TECHNICALLY still the 10th here in California, so here’s this week’s free tool.

SEO Quake is an extension for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. It’s a great tool for webmasters to improve their websites, but also a terrific tool for an affiliate manager doing due diligence on the websites their affiliates list.

My favorite feature is the Whois tool. I use this to check the registrant information on websites on affiliate applications before I approve them. I use the whois data to try to weed out the shadier side of affiliates registering with websites that do not belong to them.

As with most toolbars or extensions, which features you include are completely customizable. Another great feature for the SEM/SEO minded is the page rank button and the other Alexa rankings and Google index numbers.

Of course, there are tons of features of the toolbar that I haven’t even explored! So go check it out at www.SEOquake.com and tell me what your most useful feature of the toolbar is!

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