Affsum West 09 Keynote Gary Vaynerchuk
This was a great keynote, given by Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV. He killed it in terms of getting the crowd riled up and rearing to go for the rest of the show. He also did something I haven’t seen from other keynote speakers – he actually opened it up for questions. Gary has a very real, conversational style of speaking, which I appreciate. He curses, and beware I have republished some things verbatim so there’s some choice words below.
The show organizers did something else cool and different – they streamed the keynote speech live on Ustream.
Bullet Point Review!
- More emphasis is needed on community.
- Content is king, but marketing is the queen and she runs the house.
- Be authentic – he never does double takes or edits out stray bits for WLTV.
- 45-60 minutes spent on content, the rest is on monetization.
- If you’re not doing vanity searches for your name or your brand, you’re a monumental clown.
- Too many people preach to this crowd.
- We’ve been aiming to hit singles but we all have the talent to hit home runs.
- Sink your teeth into your passion.
- Why can’t we be artists AND entrepreneurs?
- If you want to make money, then you should. Don’t feel bad for it.
- If you have cockroaches in the back of your pizza place, clean that shit up! (i.e. anything you do that’s wrong or shady WILL come out).
- People don’t want to see ROI numbers.
- People are not creating multiple channels and should.
- Create more angles and more opportunity to make money.
- ROI will be much more important with the economic situation we’re in.
- Social Media is bullshit – it’s just the extension of business.
- Watch a 13 year old interact – they’re not going to be reading the newspapers or watching the nightly news.
- Details are what really build business.
- When you build brand equity, you’re always able to make money.
- If you think Twitter is your main play for the rest of your life, you’re an asshole.
- When you care, you win.
- We all now go direct to consumer.
- Twitter is word of mouth on steroids.
- If you leave here with nothing else, ask yourself this: Where the hell am I going? What do I want to do?
Points brought up during the Q&A
How do you build multiple brands? There are no tactics, just be who you are.- How do you cross pollinate across different brands and networks? It’s like fishing in other ponds. Your message carries. When you step outside this space, you sound like fucking yoda! Focus your message across multiple channels.
- How has PleaseDressMe.com not fizzled? They said from the beginning that the goal was affiliate marketing to make money. People took them more seriously. They created the hype to leverage the hype.
All in all, a good way to start the conference! Getting people riled up at 9:45am on a Monday morning isn’t an easy task!
Read MoreAffsum Session: Ethical Issues in Affiliate Marketing
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, Rakuten Rewards (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.
Read MoreAffsum Session: The Ultimate Pitching Guide
Date: Sunday, January 11th, 2009. Session 2d, 1:30pm.
Session Description: Experts share their best (and most outrageous) secrets for getting attention from merchants, media and the masses. You’ll learn the tips, tricks and techniques to get the attention you seek. The panel consisted of:
- Lisa Picarille, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Revenue Magazine (Moderator)
- Anita Campbell, Editor-in-Chief, SmallBizTrends.com
- Jim Kukral, Owner, TheBizWebCoach.com
- Peter Shankman, Founder, Help a Reporter (HARO)
I was looking forward to this panel, and it didn’t disappoint. I also learned that Peter Shankman never needs more coffee – he’s animated enough as it is!
Bullet Point Review!
- A good pitch solves a problem.
- This might be common sense, but DON’T PLAGIARIZE!
- Make sure you have a discussion with young PR people that plagiarizing is NOT ok.
- Know who you’re pitching to! It will help determine the angle of your pitch.
- Resource: The Bad Pitch Blog
- Take 5 seconds and read what a reporter wants & oblige – that will get you in the door to just follow submission directions.
- No attachments – filters often delete those emails.
- A reporter must be able to get the point of your pitch in 7 seconds.
- Getting attention from a blogger is different than getting attention from traditional media.
- Leave comments consistently to get noticed.
- If you develop a personal relationship, it’ll help.
- Use the reporter’s name in blog posts.
- Make your pitch sound like a scoop, like you’re an industry insider.
- Do something timely and a little different to get noticed.
- Book: Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work–And Why Your Company Needs Them
- Some reporters now will only accept pitches via Twitter.
- If you can’t pitch in 140 characters, you need to work on brevity anyway.
- Try live streaming and letting people interact with you in real time.
- Twitter has replaced focus groups with the use of search.
- Publish your news wherever you can, like blogs.
- Book: Marketing Outrageously: How to Increase Your Revenue by Staggering Amounts!
- Press releases will be obsolete very soon.
- Resource: Twittering Journalists Wiki
I don’t remember there actually being a Q&A in this session. If there was, I think I included any good points in my notes already.
Overall this was an excellent session. They really didn’t use any slides, so I can’t share any. But with a session like this, it was more about their past experience and real-world knowledge than any special slides or data.
Read MoreAffsum Session: Advanced Approaches To Affiliate Recruiting, Training, and Management
Date: Sunday, January 11th, 2009. Session 1b, 12:00pm.
Session Description: Dual presentation on advanced techniques, strategies and ideas for affiliate training and management. This enlightening, and entertaining session will help you improve and grow your affiliate program. The panel consisted of:
- Heather Paulson, President, Paulson Management Group
- Geno Prussakov, CEO & President, AM Navigator LLC
Bullet Point Review!
- Affiliate Managers = ones called to manage the unmanageable ones.
- Don’t think of it as Affiliate Management – think of it as Affiliate Leadership + Affiliate Program Management.
- Affiliates are normally intolerant of bogged down management, so you can’t actually manage them, just the program.
- Affiliate managers deal with different affiliates at different maturity levels.
- Use a contingent management style and strategies that are situational.
- More than 350 of the Fortune 500 companies use a contingent approach.
- There are tools to use to find affiliates: Syntryx, DomainTools, manual research, Email Analyst.
- iSpionage is a great tool to monitor keywords and find affiliates that way.
- If your program is on Commission Junction, ask them for a Push Offer – request recruiting function is turned on for your account.
Unfortunately the Q&A was a bit useless since no one bothered to go up to the microphones that were provided, so the questions were unintelligible. And judging by the answers they gave that I could hear, they must have been really specific because I didn’t really get much from the answers.
I admit, this session was a bit of a let down for me. It started late due to some technical difficulties with the presentation and so they were rather rushed. I’ve heard Heather speak before, and while she really knows what she’s talking about, she talked about the same tools she’s been talking about since I first heard her speak. Geno was refreshing since I’ve never heard him speak before but his data was a bit hard to grasp. This session definitely needed the help of the slides, so I’m including them.
All in all I think Heather has good things to share for affiliate managers just starting out, but I’ll be passing on her sessions from now on since it’s clear she’ll be sharing the same things. Definitely recommended though if you’ve never heard her talk about Syntryx (she has to be their biggest cheerleader, hands down) or Affiliate Relationship Management.
Here are the slides from the presentation, courtesy of Affiliate Summit:
Read MoreWhen a microblog stands in for a real blog…
Anyone who follows me on Twitter (if you don’t yet – what’s your excuse?) could see that I was more than making up for my lack of internet on my laptop by tweeting notes from the sessions I was in. I strained one of my fingers on my dominant right hand Sunday night bowling with the folks from GTO Management, and even taking traditional written notes was a challenge.
So before I kick off all the notes I took at the sessions (it was lighter this conference than I have in the past), here’s all the tidbits of knowledge I tweeted while attending sessions at Affiliate Summit West 09.
From the Buy.at Party at Moon:
- http://twitpic.com/11sw2 – Tear the roof off at Moon buy.at party
- http://twitpic.com/11t7v – From the roof of the palms
From The Ultimate Pitching Guide Session:
- @skydiver just said re pitches on twitter “if u can’t pitch in 140 char u need 2 work on brevity anyway”
- Twitter has replaced focus groups- @skydiver
From the ShareASale Under the Star’s 80’s themed party:
- http://twitpic.com/1243s – Jon levine @ sas party
- http://twitpic.com/124e8 – Gettin’ down at SAS party
From Affiliate Videos: Where do they work best? Session:
- Video session: Youtube is larger than Microsoft in search engines- 77mil uniques
- u don’t have to have a professional prod studio to develop video
- .tv traffic increasing but still nowhere near as high as .com
- very brand & vertical specific video creative is the most requested
- People buy from people – at the end of the day video is the most effective medium for that. Amen!
- I love @andrewwee for bringing up ShamWOW in his question!
- get out there & try it!
From the Pinnacle Awards Gala:
- Nice touch on the tux & beer @affiliatetip
- Right on for Train Signals donating $10k for Breast Cancer Research- squish a boob save a life!
- Mike Allen – Affiliate of the Year
- AM of the yr- @djambazov Angel
- pinnacle award exceptional merchant CelebrateExpress.com
- pinnacle award Affiliate Mktg Advocate @mellies! Melanie Seery
- pinnacle award Best Blogger @jangro! Scott Jangro
- affiliate marketing legend – congrats to Kellie Stevens!
- congrats to thew winners!
From Advanced Optimization for Landing Pages Session:
- 2% avg conversion rate: 2009 year of conversion optimization
- test everything assume nothing
- Lisa Crossly Hunter: what are your affiliates doing that your search team can borrow from?
- start now, but don’t start without a plan. And test.
- gen rule of thumb- at least 100 conversions for at least a week (per element you change, I forgot to include that in the tweet)
From the Affiliate Triathalon:
- http://twitpic.com/12mj4 – #asw09 Brian Littleton of SAS @ Affiliate Triathalon
Of course if you’re REALLY bored you can just go to Twitter Search and enter in “#asw09 trishalyn” and see EVERYTHING I tweeted while at the conference 😀
Read MoreBack from Affiliate Summit West 09
Well, for those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or didn’t see me at Affiliate Summit West 2009, you’ve likely been wondering why I didn’t post from the conference.
Let’s just say that the only way to be connected when travelling is to bring your own internet with you. Wired and wi-fi didn’t work for me while in Las Vegas, but I’m back to reality here in California and back to a stable internet connection!
I have wrap ups, summaries, exciting events that happened, and notes from the sessions I attended to share witih you. But, we can leave that for later. In the meantime, I just want to give a big shout out to Stephanie Lichtenstein, Karen & Joel Garcia, Wade Tonkin, Lisa Picarille, Connie Berg, and Michael Buechele for providing excellent company during the conference. Also big thanks to Buy.at and oneNetworkDirect for providing awesome prizes that I won, but I’ll get into that later too 🙂
Read More
