Make Money Online

A world in which customers walk through the door of a business and get a coupon especially crafted for them is much closer, thanks to Foursquare.

The application, which has become the dominant player in the world of mobile, geo-specific check-ins, has unveiled a set of analytics for businesses which will put a name and a face to loyal customers.

The dashboard, which is still in alpha, is debuting for 30 select customers before a bigger roll-out. The dashboard gives businesses a look at who is checking in, breaks them down by when they come in, gender, and number of visits. Businesses will also be able to see which platform customers are using to share their status.  If your visitors are heavy into Twitter or Facebook, you can follow them there. Other types of information tracked includes: total check-ins, unique visitors, male-to-female ratio, and top visitors.

Writes Zachary Wilson of Fast Company,

“With priceless data like this, it’s easy to imagine a blow-up in participating venues coming soon. More businesses means more users, more users means more businesses, and suddenly Foursquare is the Facebook of check-ins.”

Foursquare plans to add additional real-time information for business users, including weather updates. Potentially, this dashboard could be used by large chain businesses (like a Wal-Mart or Starbucks) from a central location with a view of all of their outlets in real time.

“We’ve been talking with quite a few [large corporations] who are excited about the potential for this,” said Tristan Walker, Business Development at Foursquare, in an interview with Mashable. “Once we can add purchase information on top of check-ins things can get pretty interesting.”

This valuable information helps Foursquare give itself even more distance ahead of competitors like Gowalla, and the addition of a newly designed iPhone app will give FourSquare an additional bump in users.

As the dashboard and analytics are tweaked, based on the alpha tests, plans are to introduce the service to the 1,000 or so registered businesses currently running specials on Foursquare.

Read the original:
Foursquare Offers Up User Data with Check-in Analytics

Ever get the feeling that marketers don’t really understand social media – or at least don’t effectively utilize it?

That’s the premise of Steve Rubel’s article on Forbes.com, and he makes an important observation worthy of discussion. Rubel is a well-known member of the digerati who is Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, the digital division of the world’s largest independent PR firm.

Rubel says marketers are making a massive shift to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, sometimes to the exclusion of mentioning their own corporate websites. He wonders whether the corporate URL is a dying breed.

But Rubel sees the potential for this strategy to backfire. He says consumers could “perceive corporate real estate on Facebook as a lame attempt to appear cool and hip.” “Many brands are just using their Twitter and Facebook presences to spew out updates, without any thought to how consumers will benefit by essentially opting in,” says Rubel. And most important, he says, “very few businesses treat social networks as personal, conversational spaces. Hardly any feature real employees. And a scant few aim to advance shared interests.”

I think Steve Rubel has given voice to something the big traditional marketers are missing – something savvy online marketers surely understand: social media is not just another channel for ads. As I mentioned in my post about Twitter going commercial, ads on Facebook and Twitter need to be a good fit with those platforms for them to be viewed as authentic.

In fact, authenticity may be the real issue here. Rubel’s observations point to the fact that some big marketers may be viewing social media in an entirely wrong context. Their quick fix answer is to muscle their way into Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – but once they get there, they have no clue what to do. Think of it as a bully on the basketball court who has no shooting skill. He may be able to take the ball away from the other kids, but he’ll have a heck of a time scoring a basket.

I’m reminded of a time when marketers wanted to convert their messages to another medium called direct marketing. It was a sometimes painful transition: The marketers had to speak in a different voice that put the emphasis on “you” instead of “me.” That’s not easy when you have a corporate ego. Marketers had to learn that direct marketing was at its heart a correspondence relationship. The promotional approach had to be engaging. Copy had to be loaded with benefits, not just features. There had to be a compelling offer. And marketers had to have a strong call to action and numerous response paths – they’d get nowhere without asking for the order and providing specific ways to respond.

In the same way, marketers can’t just stumble blindly into social media. They need to learn the same kind of lesson they were forced to learn when they embraced direct marketing.

Social media is a different animal. Marketers have to engage in a two-way dialogue with consumers to make it work, and they have to be willing to expose themselves to possible negative feedback and open criticism. They have to budget and staff for social media. They need people whose responsibility includes engaging, responding to, and following up with consumers.

All of this takes a commitment to using social media on its own terms. If you want to play on someone’s field, you have to use their ball. Sorry, but social media doesn’t fit into that comfortable little box called traditional marketing. When you look at the way some marketers are approaching social media, you have to wonder if they will ever understand its potential.

Go here to read the rest:
Do Marketers Understand Social Media?

Believe it or not there is more to SXSW than the parties. Although from chatter on Twitter it’s often hard to tell. With SXSW kicking off this week I’m sure most of you have planned which parties to attend but maybe haven’t looked at the session schedule quite yet. So before you get lost in the lines to the film screenings, bars, celebrity signings, and hoping food joints like the Magnolia Café or the Iron Works, here are my picks for the Top 10 must see interactive sessions at SXSW 2010:

Smackdown: Consumers Privacy vs. Advertiser Revenue
Time: Friday March 12, 2PM
Hashtag: #smackdownprivacyrevenuet

The panel premise that the FTC could ban all forms of tracking consumer web activity is a nice but alarmist hook. Still, it is true that the FTC is being more aggressive in policing online activity and the assembled panelists should provide advertisers some clear insights into compliance issues.

Panelists include:

• Alan Chapell, President Chapell & Associates
• Alison Pepper, Director of Research of Public Policy at Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)
• Jordan Mitchell, Vice President of Data Intelligence Rubicon Project
• Ingrid Sanders, Director AdAdvisor at TARGUSinfo

Crime Scene: Digital Identity Theft
Time: Friday March 12, 3:30PM
Hashtag: #digitalidtheft

The theft of digital identity is often easier and sometimes more damaging than identity theft offline. As social media mixes more with ecommerce this will become a larger problem. Learning methods to make that ID more secure is valuable information. Hopefully Bill has the sense to not make it too pitchy.

Panelists include:

• Bill Morrow, Chairman and CEO of CSIdentity
• Aaron Strout, CMO of Powered.com

Eight Ways to Deal with Bastards
Time: Friday March 12, 5PM
Hashtag: #8waysdealbastards

As the saying goes, no one ever has a good day in customer service. This is especially true when, let’s face it, some of your customers  are inevitably  bastards. This session offers a few copeing mechanisms.

Panelists include:

• Bryan Mason, Founder Small Batch Inc / Typekit
• Jason Shellen. CEO and Founder of Thing Labs
• Lori McLeese, Chief People Officer at  Room to Read
• Karen Walrond, Founder Chookooloonks Media

Big Brother in Your Brain: Neuroscience & Marketing
Time: Saturday March 13, 11AM
Hashtag: #bigbrotherinyourbrain

I’m a science geek, so when you mention the word “neuroscience” in a panel about marketing I’m ready to jack in. The concept of using MRIs to analyze brain activity when exposed to different marketing stimuli is very interesting. So is the brewing battle of math (analytics) vs. creativity; somehow I don’t see the two concepts as being mutually exclusive. All the makings of a great session!

Panelists include:

• Roger Dooley, Vice President Digital Marketing at Hobsons
• Gary Koepke, Co-Founder Modernista!
• Eric Kogelschatz, Co-Founder shark&minnow
• Dr. A.K. Pradeep, President and Chief Executive Officer NeuroFocus
• Dr. Danielle Stolzenberg, PHD University of Virginia

Sleeping Giants: Digital Awakens TV and Media
Time: Saturday March 13, 5PM
Hashtag: #designemergingmedia

Giants always follow the money. Or the beanstalk. Digital has now proved that  there is money to be made online, that it is sustainable, and can draw large clients; therefore, it should be no surprise that the giants of traditional media are paying attention. Sponsored by Razorfish, who should know a thing or two about the whims of giants, the session will take on fundamental impact digital will have for advertisers and marketers.

Panelists include:

• Domenic Venuto, Managing Director Client Solutions Razorfish
• Andrew Pimentel, Director, Account Planning at Razorfish

Selling Subculture Without Selling Out
Time: Sunday March 14, 12:30PM
Hashtag: #sellingsubculture

Having worked with Jones Soda online marketing efforts for nearly four years I know full well how difficult it is to balance the need to post large sales numbers with the imperative to protect the brand/consumer relationship. This session provides some guidelines on how to hit those numbers without selling out.

Panelists include:

• Richard Nash, Founder Cursor
• Raymond Leon Roker, Founder URB Magazine
• Molly Crabapple, Founder Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School
• Jeff Newelt, Publisher SMITH Magazine
• Gala Darling, Founder iCiNG

Online Advertising: Losing the Race to the Bottom
Time: Sunday March 14, 3:30PM
Hashtag: #racetothebottom

We spend a lot of time in this industry thinking about “how” and “where” to advertise. The concepts of building real relationships with publishers, making sure the advertising is doesn’t take away from the content, and respectfully dealing with the audience are all topics that are usually just paid lip service. Glad to see this session challenging us to change the way we think.

Panelists include:

• Jim Coudal, Principal Coudal Partners
• John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Open Science: Create, Collaborate, Communicate
Time: Monday March 15, 9:30AM
Hashtag: #openscience

Ok, I will admit this made the Top 10 because, well, as I stated earlier I’m a science geek. Ever since I interviewed Scott Maxwell for Gnomedex two years ago I’ve been fascinated about social media’s ability to pry open the doors of previously sequestered industries. It will be nice to see what progress NASA and others have made since then.

Panelists include:

• Ariel Waldman, Founder Spacehack.org
• Dr. Kirsten Sanford, Ph.D Neurophysiology, This Week in Science
• Jessy Cowan-Sharp, Collaborative Web Technology Developer NASA Ames Research Center
• Natalie Villalobos, Community Manager Google
• Tantek Çelik, Computer Scientist Microformats.org

Web Series 2.0: Big Campaigns on Digital Dollars
Time: Monday March 15, 11AM
Hashtag: #bigcampaigndigitaldollars

Big campaigns don’t always require big dollars. In the social space it is about smart engagement. Smart advertisers are turning to producers and content creators to help maximize their budgets. This is the perfect panel to find out how.

Panelists include:

• Melissa Fallon, Vice President of Television and Emerging Media Davie Brown Entertainment
• Chris Hanada, Co-Founder Retrofit Films
• Milo Ventimiglia, Co-Founder DiVide Pictures
• Wilson Cleveland, SVP + Director CJP Digital Media
• Andrew Hampp, Reporter Advertising Age

Will Kiva Kill Your Nonprofit? Donations 2.0
Time: Monday March 16, 11AM
Hashtag: #kivakillnonprofit

New fundraising models are changing the ways donors can interact with nonprofits. Kiva, of course, is one  a leading example of success from  such a model. While I don’t feel that the Kiva model will hurt the majority of nonprofits, I do feel that they will need to adapt to new methods of outreach to successfully maintain their donor base.

Panelists include:

• Skylar Woodward, Designer/Lender Kiva
• Ruth-Anne Renaud, Vice President of Women’s Philanthropy and Interactive Marketing Opportunity International
• Milo Sybrant, Online Fundraising Manager Amnesty International USA
• Michael Cervino, Vice President Beaconfire Consulting
• Katie Bisbee, Executive Director DonorsChoose.org

Hope you get back to your hotel in one piece and you enjoy the sessions at SXSW 2010.

Read more:
Top 10 Must See Interactive Sessions at SXSW 2010

Among the so-called Amazon Taxes Colorado HB 1193 is unique. Signed into law by Governor Bill Ritter on February 25th the legislation went into effect on March 1st and is heralded as a landmark bill, the first of its kind to put teeth behinds its attempt to collect sales tax. It requires all online retailers who do not collect sales tax to put a notice in the Colorado customer’s invoice notifying them they are by law obligated to pay sales tax in the state for their purchase. Beyond that it further requires retailers to submit a yearly list of customers and purchasing data to support Colorado’s enforcement ability.

The law also differs from its Amazon Tax brethren in that it purposefully, and with the support of large affiliates like ShopAtHome, attempted to spare Colorado affiliates from the fate they suffered in other states where similar laws have passed. For the Performance Marketing Association the removal of affiliate focused language was seen as a victory.

Unfortunately the attempt protect affiliates failed.

Amazon, who provided lobbyists during the fight against HB 1193, served termination notices over the weekend to thousands of Colorado affiliates saying:

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

Amazon is not alone in this stance. A handful of other companies including Oriental Trading Company, Hammacher Schlemmer, Terry’s Village and GiftBaskets.com have terminated affiliate relationships in the state. With Amazon’s announcement over the weekend many other are expected to follow suit including Overstock.

Many members of the PMA feel that such actions are due to advertisers who have not taken the time to familiarize themselves with the law’s new language. In Amazon’s case, Amazon does say it will continue to sell to Colorado residents, whether they will comply with providing lists of its customers who are Colorado residents to help with enforcement has yet to be seen. Knowing Amazon’s past behavior it is doubtful and a legal challenge against this legislation won’t be surprising.

Read the original here:
Amazon Terminates Colorado Affiliates, Joins Growing List of Advertisers

Reports are flying around cyberspace that Twitter will soon be introducing ads. Just recently, Twitter’s head of monetization, Anamitra Banerji, said the company would launch at least a beta test of ads, possibly within a month.

The word on the street is that Twitter’s ads will maintain the 140 characters-or-less mandate, and that the ads will be tied to Twitter searches, not unlike Google’s original ads. If this is true, then Twitter users will potentially only see ads if they are searching for something.

Ads on Twitter should be of interest to online marketers. Whether you personally use Twitter or not, you can’t ignore the 27 million users who tweet. And it isn’t just consumers – somewhere around half of the world’s largest companies are officially on Twitter.

That user base may be a far cry from the 400 million active users of Facebook, which also offers ads, but it is still an impressive number. Because of the nature of Twitter, its users are largely a mobile bunch. That means a Twitter advertiser could very effectively target an audience that is likely to be receptive to mobile marketing campaigns.

Apparently, some potential advertisers are already turning up their noses at the idea.

“Advertising on Twitter will feel like your social media strategy has failed,” says Paul Troy, global head of advertising and content for Britain’s Barclaycard.

“It doesn’t feel like something leading brands will do.” Cheryl Calverley, a senior global manager for Unilever’s Axe Skin, questions the value of Twitter ads because, she says, Twitter “doesn’t have the reach of broadcast media.”

Those comments not withstanding, if Twitter does indeed launch its own ads, there will undoubtedly be advertisers who will try them. The larger issue, however, involves the inevitable commercialization of every medium. At one time, there was an admittedly naïve belief that social media platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter should remain ad-free. Let’s be real, though: they have to make money. As soon as a medium gains critical mass, its owners have to be thinking about ways to become profitable. Search and social media sites offer free access, so there aren’t many options for revenue generation other than advertising.

Still, some ads on social media platforms may stretch the limits, leading marketers to question whether such advertising is too intrusive. An article in The New York Times points to the “self-service” ads on Facebook as an example: “Many advertisers who use the self-service system are tempted to go as far as possible in making ads that attract attention and appear relevant, aided by the information that people give to Facebook.”

While very targeted ads may seem like a good idea, they can also turn off some consumers, says The Times:

“From the perspective of many users, the tailored ads can often seem, at best, presumptuous. Women who change their status to “engaged” on Facebook to share the news with their friends, for example, report seeing a flood of advertisements for services and products like wedding photographers, skin treatments and weight-loss regimens.”

If and when Twitter launches its advertising program, it may very well fall prey to advertising that is not always tasteful. But that is unlikely to stop Twitter from moving forward. Like other social media, Twitter must deal with economic reality.

Go here to read the rest:
Twitter Goes Commercial

A new study out by the Pew Internet and American Life Project tells us how consumers get their news. No surprise: 92 percent of Americans use multiple platforms (television, newspapers, radio, the Internet) to get news on a typical day. But the real story, of course, is the impact of the Internet and the fundamental ways it is changing consumer behavior.

The Internet is now third in popularity for news, behind only local television and national television news. But here are some key findings that go a lot deeper:

• Most people use between two and five online news sources
• 65 percent say they do not have a single favorite website for news
• 33 percent of cell phone owners access news on their cell phones
• 37 percent of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter
• 50 percent of American news consumers say they rely to some degree on people around them to tell them the news they need to know
• More than 80 percent of online news consumers get or share links in emails.
• 70 percent of Americans think “the amount of news and information available from different sources today is overwhelming.”

What can online marketers learn from these statistics?

1.    It appears that the Internet has replaced traditional newspapers and news magazines, but it has also encouraged news-hopping, so to speak. If consumers are using multiple news sources rather than a single source, clearly no one media outlet has garnered their loyalty. Are consumers not getting an objective perspective from a single source? Or do they get different kinds of news from different sites? Maybe consumers are more discriminating than they’re often given credit for and they like a story to be validated by more than one source. Whatever the reason, it means online marketers shouldn’t commit all of their ad dollars to just one online news source.

2.    Consumers will likely rely more and more on their cell phones to get online information and news. As I wrote in a previous post, 2010 could become a banner year for mobile usage, so online marketers need to plan now to get their fair share of this marketplace.

3.    The old news paradigm seems to be crumbling. It used to be that authoritative figures delivered the news via traditional media channels. Newspaper reporters’ stories and columnists’ commentaries carried weight. Television anchors were respected. The news was the news.

The new news paradigm is very different. Professional journalists are being replaced with citizen journalists and bloggers. While amateur journalism may not always be a good thing, it does represent a much broader spectrum of observation and opinion. Media outlets like CNN encourage consumers to send in their video reports. Over a third of consumers are taking a participatory role in the news now, and that’s likely to increase. They’re sharing the news with friends and acquaintances, discussing it online, and not just accepting news at face value. For the most part, online marketers already recognize the consumers’ collaborative power. That’s why they are building in opportunities for social interaction and feedback into their marketing programs.

4.    It may not be surprising that the majority of news consumers are overwhelmed by information. Television channels have proliferated and the Internet has opened up more informational opportunities than any consumer could ever handle. But this may suggest another opportunity: What if an online marketer could help the consumer cut through the clutter? It’s already being done by organizations such as SmartBrief, a media company that hand-picks relevant news, summarizes it, and delivers it with links to the original stories in e-mail newsletters tailored to 25 different industries.

We all recognize that the Internet has fundamentally changed the manner in which people consume information. As marketers, we need to also recognize what each of us can do to help solve information overload – and to become such a vital resource that a consumer will choose the information we provide over someone else’s.

See more here:
4 Lessons Marketers Can Learn From How Consumers Get Their News

It would be a major coup in basketball for the New York Knicks to land the caliber of talent the likes of LeBron James or Dwyane Wade; however unlikely this may be. Similarly, Catalina Marketing has scored such a coup in the advertising industry, announcing they have landed Chris Henger as part of their team.

Formerly the VP of Marketing & Product Development at Performics, Chris Henger was instrumental in guiding Performics’s transition into the Google Affiliate Network as part of Google’s purchase of DoubleClick in 2007. While at GAN Chris served as the Group Project Manager until early this year.

Catalina Marketing is a behavioral marketing focused company representing clients like Weight Watchers. Chris will manage the company’s in-store network, said to be comprised of 90 million households and 300 million weekly shopper transactions.

We wish Chris Henger the best of luck in his move. His leadership will be missed in the affiliate industry.

View original here:
Chris Henger Goes from Google to Catalina

Uh-oh. Just when it seems social media can do no wrong, Yelp gets hit with a class-action lawsuit that essentially accuses the local review heavyweight of extortion. Yelp of course fired back, but the end result of such cases is that some element of consumer trust has been inevitably lost. A new study suggest that consumers trust in social media’s most valued properties is waning.

Public relations firm Edelman just released its 2010 “Trust Barometer.” It indicates that only 25 percent of the public thinks their friends and peers “are credible information sources about companies,” down from 45 percent the previous year.

Such a study can strike fear into the hearts of marketers who increasingly siphon budget dollars into Facebook, MySpace and Twitter; one of the reasons they do so is to take advantage of a social environment that encourages sharing opinions with friends. If three-quarters of those opinions aren’t viewed as credible, however, that could mean a marketing investment in social media isn’t such a great investment after all.

Edelman’s CEO, Richard Edelman, thinks the fact that consumers are less reliant on each other’s opinions suggests that “it’s a more skeptical time. … People have to see messages in different places and from different people. That means experts as well as peers or company employees.”

In Ad Age magazine, Michael Bush observes:

In some cases, social networks themselves may be contributing to the decline in trust. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to maintain larger circles of casual associates, which may be diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks. In short, the more acquaintances a person has, the harder it can be to trust him or her.

This, it seems to me, is a core problem. In the pre-social media days, each consumer had a relatively small circle of friends and their opinions meant something. Now the meaning of “friend” has morphed into nothing more than an online contact. Such a contact hasn’t necessarily built up trust with the consumer over time. These “friends” couldn’t possibly have the same kind of influence as a closely knit group of personal friends with whom a relationship has been built.

If there’s a silver lining in the results, it appears that the credibility of friends outweighs the trustworthiness of television news, according to the Trust Barometer. But consumer trust is down across the board. Newspapers and radio news were trusted only slightly more than friends.

So what should marketers who are still enamored with social media do? Global brand strategist Jonathan Salem Baskin has a provocative answer:  Take a long hard look at where to spend your marketing dollars. “Nobody with responsibility for a bottom line has ever felt comfortable with social media as a replacement for traditional advertising,” Baskin says. In fact, Baskin thinks too many marketers may have gotten into social media because of “the allure of cost savings and glib convenience.”

Baskin thinks part of the reason consumers may have driven the popularity of social media in the first place is because “they ran away from commercial speech because advertising had proven to be so irritatingly useless. … If we renewed our commitment to selling based on credibility, authenticity and utility, maybe people would trust what we tell them, respect our corporate reputations, and give us their purchasing loyalty.”

If Baskin is right, marketers need to examine their own promotional strategy and make sure they are meeting the informational needs of consumers. They can’t abdicate responsibility for traditional marketing simply by picking social media over another form of communication. Sounds like marketers have some soul searching to do.

Still, it leaves open the question of the apparent decline in consumer trust. Consumers may just be feeling a general malaise about the economy. Or they may be telling us that they are less confident in the advice they receive from their friends – and the information they obtain from media channels. If the latter is the case, it’s something we should all be concerned about.

The rest is here:
Is Consumer Trust Waning?

AOL Inc. has sold its affiliate marketing business, Buy.at, for an undisclosed price to Digital Window Ltd., which runs AffiliateWindow and ShopWindow.  Digitial Window claims that the purchase of Buy.at will make them the largest “performance-based marketing” group in the UK, a place believed to be currently held by TradeDoubler.

AOL, which separated from Time Warner Inc. late last year, bought Buy.at in 2008 for a reported $150 million,  a price unconfirmed by the company. The plan was to integrate it with the ambitious Platform-A, its ad platform designed to cover every market and niche for its own properties and its ad network.  Platform-A has been renamed AOL Advertising.

If anyone has more news on the transaction, please let us know.

More:

Last week, Facebook was granted a patent for its news feed. Although it’s not yet clear how Facebook plans to use this patent, what is clear is that social media is growing up to be a real industry with real business sense.

With this patent, Facebook is in an excellent position to generate revenue off of its competitors’ success. But more importantly, securing intellectual property like this is a sign that the social network plans to be something much more than a place where to kill time at work.

Owning the Stream

The strange thing about Twitter’s success is that Twitter is more of a feature than a stand alone social network. That much is evident in how easily both Facebook and Google Buzz assimilated the Twitter stream format. And with the granting of this patent, Twitter might not even own the rights to itself anymore. As the patent abstract reads:

A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items.

It’s easy to see how a few social networking sites might be wondering where this leaves them. In fact, the very concept of a news feed seems to be part of what makes a social networking world go round. So now that one company owns the idea, they seem to have that whole world in their hands.

Intellectual Property & Market Share

In business, the real money is in intellectual property — it’s in owning ideas, content, and technology. And given how so many social networks are struggling with their revenue models, it makes perfect sense for these companies to start securing the rights to the basic features that make their their user experience what it is. With that in mind, there are three different things that Facebook could choose to do with this patent.

First, Facebook could decide to do nothing, and just keep this patent up their sleeve as a bargaining chip for some future negotiation with a rival. For instance, should Facebook explore some kind of search/advertising partnership with Google in the future, they could remind Google that Google Buzz is in violation of their patent, and use that to negotiate a more advantageous deal.

Second, they could decide to push out the competition by denying them the use of this feature. This will force many of Facebook’s rivals to close-up shop and users will end up spending more and more of their online time on Facebook than on some (now defunct) alternative.

Finally, and more in line with social media’s spirit of cooptition, Facebook can use this patent to charge their competition licensing fees for their news item feature. Not only would this bolster their ad revenues, but it would let them profit off of the success of their competitors.

This last strategy would also be a more sustainable one because it would give competitors a comfortable sphere of operation, and help prevent them from having to innovate entirely new ways of offering their own online user experience. Besides, users’ attentions are limited, and Facebook is probably nearing their maximum potential mind share as is, and this last approach would allow them to capture additional market share without having to capture additional mind share.

Buying Up More Than You Can Chew

Of course, winning this patent may only be the beginning (and not the end) of the intellectual property battle for Facebook. As Shevonne Polastre, a writer for Penn Olson pointed out, not only was Facebook not the first to come up with a news feed, and:

Due to the difference between Facebook’s newsfeed in 2006 and today, many of these social networking sites can have ways around it. Twitter can say that it’s a microblogging service, which has nothing to do with status updates. LinkedIn can say that it’s only tailored to business. Google can say that it’s a social aggregator, and not really providing updates on specific people.

So while it’s not quite clear what this patent is really going to end up meaning for the social media industry, what is clear is that social media is growing up. This kind of intellectual property strategy is the stuff that big industry is made of. It can be used to raise barriers to entry and put the competition out of business. It can control the competition by making them dependent on you. In the case of Facebook, the latter of the two options makes a lot more sense and seem much more likely.

More here:

Affiliate marketing is receiving some not so great publicity…again. This time it comes from Rik Ferguson over at TrendMicro blog as he reveals a Facebook Account Upgrade Scam, where fan pages promote a Gold Facebook account upgrade. Of course, there is no such thing as a gold Facebook account.

From Rik Ferguson’s blog post (bolding by me for emphasis):

So what’s the point for the scammer? Well if you follow all the instructions, you first invite all your friends to come and check out this (cough) great deal. Then, if you are credulous enough to click the button, you are informed that in order to access the Account Upgrade page you must complete “1 quick, free survey”, different versions of the scam page offer different surveys, but this is where the money is made.

The survey I tested linked (via a couple of affiliate marketing services) to a “Werewolf vs. Vampire” quiz which promised to tell me which I am (surely I should know that already?) at the end of the ten questions I am invited to enter my mobile phone number to receive my results. If I do that I am agreeing to pay a £9.00 joining fee followed by £9.00 every week until I cancel my membership via SMS.

Of course, I immediately wanted to know which affiliate networks were involved considering TrendMirco’s report of around one million Facebook user’s being subscribed to the numerous fake gold account fan pages.

The Gory (Albeit Probably Boring) Details

Although, it was stated that the scam had been reported to Facebook and the content was most likely being removed, I got out my shovel and began digging. A quick Google search showed the content was being removed, but I was able to quickly pull up some of the offending pages courtesy of Google cache (see below).

The first thing I noticed was that the affiliate behind the fake Facebook upgrades appears to be geo-targeting the offers displayed to the end user. While Rik Ferguson obviously received UK cell phone offers, the offers displayed to me were US based offers (see below).

The actual offers differed at times, but all pretty much followed the same CPA network click stream. The irony of one of the quizzes being called “How Dumb Are You” was not lost on me.

The domain responsible for the above display on Facebook is corporate-promo-mfg.com. This domain was consistent throughout all of my research.

The affiliate link on corporate-promo-mfg.com is for CPALead with the publisher id 42109. Whois records for CPALead.com show the company as located in Wisconsin. The contact information on their web site indicates they are located in Las Vegas, NV.

CPALead redirects the click to click2go.org with an affiliate id of 3013 and sub id 42109 (passing the original publisher id). Click2go uses a Privacy Whois service, however the IP Location is tied to TattoMedia.

TattoMedia is certainly a player in these types of SMS ads and I’ve come across them numerous times in connection with adware usage. At this point, CPALead is acting as an affiliate/publisher of TattoMedia.

Click2Go then redirects the click to webventures.directtrack.com with the aff id CD43 and sub id 3013 (the id for CPALead as an affiliate with TattoMedia). Note that at this point, the original affiliate/publisher id is no longer being carried through on the actual tracking links. If you go to webventures.directtrack.com, you are brought to a sign-up page for MundoMedia.com. MundoMedia uses a Privacy Whois service as well, but their web site shows contact information for Toronto and Los Angeles.

MundoMedia  redirects the click to linktrack66.com containing the same aff id and sub id. Linktrack66.com is another tracking domain associated with MundoMedia.

Finally the click is redirected to MyMindQuizzes.com where the actual survey resides. MyMindQuizzes also uses a Privacy Whois service but resides on the same IP address as MundoMedia. Sometimes CPA networks will host a sign-up form for an advertiser on their own servers; other times it may be the CPA network themselves in ownership of the offer.  Looking at the Terms of Service page on MyMindQuizzes, I found mention of the company name Neo Image.

The short version is I found three CPA Networks involved in these deceptive Facebook ads: CPALead, TattoMedia and MundoMedia.

The Plot Thickens

You may be asking yourself “So what, the fraudulent ads were reported and Facebook removed the pages. It’s just a little bit of bad PR that will most likely quickly fade in people’s memory.”

If only that was case. The reality is that people who are making some nice change, regardless of how they are making it, aren’t always willing to give it up quickly. TrendMicro reported the incident on Monday. On Wednesday I did a search through Facebook (not Google but Facebook) and I found several new and active fake Facebook Gold Account fan pages with fan totals in the tens of thousands. When I viewed the profile pictures of one of these new accounts I saw pictures were added Monday. Even while Facebook was removing pages, new ones were evidently being set up.

Some of those pages are now gone, but I see new active pages again today with one simple search.

And while Facebook may be attempting to keep up the affiliate links involved remain active. There does not appear to have been any termination of the affiliate account by the CPA networks. Indeed, if you recall I went from a Google cached page on the account on Facebook to even track which CPA Networks were involved.

The Implications

There are several implications to this type of situation. The most obvious is  while the incidents were initially reported in the UK, they are now happening in the US as well. There is no way this ad promotion will meet the FTC guidelines regarding deceptive advertising practices. You don’t have to be a lawyer to figure that one out. When you start hitting numbers of consumers in the million plus range being potentially impacted, it’s almost like screaming for the FTC big stick to head your way. Everyone in the click stream trail is at legal risk.

What about those consumers? If you look at the last screen shot I posted, you’ll see that Facebook groups against this one particular scam are beginning to form. I’ll hazard a wild guess and say consumers aren’t happy about it either.

Is it a wonder that security companies tend to be less than affectionate towards affiliates? This type of activity certainly doesn’t help our case, particularly when they have seen affiliate links tied to scams, adware and the such for years now.  It should be noted that Rik Ferguson didn’t say “CPA Network affiliates”, he said “affiliate marketing”.

The lack of transparency build into the sub-affiliate model should be neither an inherent excuse nor a mechanism to hide behind when it comes to ensuring fraudulent activities do not tarnish and stain our whole industry. It’s not like we are talking about an affiliate who is capable of generating only a limited number of ad views.  If a network cannot monitor traffic from an affiliate at that level, then they probably shouldn’t be a network.  CPA Networks must become more active in establishing acceptable marketing practices, monitoring their programs and taking action on offenses within the industry and as an industry, we must be clear to those outside of our industry, including consumers, that these types of fraudulent marketing practices are unacceptable.

These types of incidents impact our industry as a whole and how we function and navigate within it.  Please stay tuned for Part Two of the post.

I wish that I could say “the end” but it’s not the end of story.  That’s will Part 2 of this post.

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Black Hat Affiliate Tactics in the Facebook Era

Like usual the combination Danica Patrick and bikini clad models got Go Daddy’s commercials a lot of attention during the Super Bowl; even the ad that was banned. Now Go Daddy is hoping to leverage their same customer base that made its provocative videos into viral hits to help drive sales; announcing this week that they are launching a new internal affiliate program.

“Our customers are our greatest marketers,” said Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. “They use our products, know the quality of Go Daddy’s customer service and can speak to the experience firsthand.”

The new affiliate program will run in tandem with their long standing (since 2005) affiliate program with Commission Junction. The CJ program, which has a five bar out of five bar rating on the network, will continue to cater to professional affiliate marketers. According to Yong Lee, Vice President Business Development & Reseller Group for Go Daddy, “Go Daddy has a great relationship with Commission Junction and currently has no plans to change this.”

The new in-house affiliate program will cater specifically to Go Daddy customers, a bit like a referral system focusing on ease of use. “Go Daddy is looking to serve people who already use Go Daddy services and want to make a commission for recommending our products and services,” said Yong. “We setup our new Affiliate Program to be easy-to-use and approachable allowing customers to suggest Go Daddy products and services to site visitors, friends and family with almost no effort.”

The program is free to join and offers a 20 percent commission a 45-day cookie. Considering it is the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in the world, if the program can leverage its user base like Amazon did with its associate the upside for Go Daddy could be huge.

The ubiquity of Go Daddy’s services, which have become an easy one-stop shop for new web users, should make this program spread fairly quickly, especially among affiliate newcomers.  For users who have had a good experience with Go Daddy, it should be no-brainer – the endorsement of Web site services on your Web site? Naturally.

For Go Daddy, it’s the latest advertising push. After its annual titillating Super Bowl ad, Go Daddy has also recently announced a social media driven ad campaign. The affiliate program should continue to spread a bigger footprint for the raucous domain register online.

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Danica Patrick Grabs the Headlines But Affiliates Make the Sales

An all star line up of panelists representing major verticals focused on online lead generation shared their thoughts on the outlook of the industry. Bruce Eatroff, Partner, Halyard Capital moderated this panel at LeadsCon 2010, held at the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

The session started off with a reap of last year and it should come as no surprise that 2009 was a tough year for the mortgage and finance industries.

Ty Taylor, Group President of Experian InteractiveSM, began by sharing some of the challenges Experian faced last year, “2009 was definitely challenging, so much of lead gen was focused on mortgage.  Those companies that diversified, leveraged their scale and sell leads down multiple channel and verticals had success.”

Continuing the theme Thomas Evans, President & CEO, Bankrate, Inc., shared insights on the mortgage industry which seemed to be one of the largest verticals represented this year at LeadsCon. Evans also felt 2009 was a tough year, “it was a challenge, CD’s were a good business, credit cards were awful and insurance was good.”

According to Ronald Pruett, Jr., Chief Executive Officer, MercuryMedia, “financial services and health care took a dip, debt settlement and health and beauty went well, however the end of 2009 saw some advertisers pull back (on their marketing spend).”

There was a lot of insightful information in this session and below I will highlight the top three things discussed in this panel. Most sessions at LeadsCon are limited to 30 minutes which makes it challenging to fully dive into a topic.  Thankfully this session was 45 minutes, but it could have gone on much longer.

1. Lead generation marketing emerging into a multi-channel approach
2. Impact of FTC regulations
3. Industry trends to watch for

A lot of time was spent discussing the emerging channels for lead gen in 2010 and beyond.  Leads were historically driven to a call center, however they are now also driving consumers to a website, mobile and social media channels.  Taylor shared that the volume of leads isn’t as high in these additional channels, however the quality is much higher.

Mr. Evans had this to say add,“Lead gen is the hot new thing, it was almost a dirty words a couple years ago and now we are sitting in a room full of smart people. People buying leads only want to deal with a few people through direct, large relationships”.

Matt Coffin, Investor, Coffin Capital discussed some of the impact from the recent FTC regulatory guidelines that passed December 1^st, 2009.  He had this to say about it, “Some of the bigger names are filing Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  It is happening in direct response TV”.  Mr. Evans was able to provide some perspective from the banking industry regarding this matter, “People in Washington are trying to be sure consumers are protected regarding violations of privacy and integrity of data.  As a result, legislators will try to over correct this”.

As for industry trends to watch for everyone agreed that there would be more consolidations of companies, however some felt it would involve a lot of small acquisitions.  Mr. Pruett felt that the application of web and television would be important going forward.  He added this, “You can build great brands through lead gen, it is quickly becoming main stream.  When you can quantify it, you can sell it.”

There was a lot of great information in this session, I hope this recap provided some insight into content this all star lineup provided.  If you attended LeadsCon and would like to add to this, I’d love to read your comments below.

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The balance between security and privacy is again being tested as Google has recently requested the help of the US National Security Agency (NSA) to better secure themselves, and their users’ data, from future cyberattacks.

The request comes on the heels of a recent discovery that two Chinese schools, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, an academic institution in China’s Shandong Province with apparent ties to the country’s military, were discovered to be the source of recent attacks against Google and 20 other large corporations. The attacks against Google were aimed at the Gmail accounts of Chinese and Western human rights activists.

The NSA’s Involvement

While both the NSA and Google at first would not confirm their new partnership, as details were being worked out, an NSA spokesperson has claimed they are working on an “information assurance mission,” that involves a broad range of commercial partners and research associates. However, when the Washington Post looked into this partnership, reporters were assured that working with the NSA does not mean that the government agency will have access to users’ searches or e-mail communications and accounts. Google will not share proprietary data either.

The Nature of the Attack

While the NSA certainly has the ability to help Google, or any company, protect themselves against a cyberattack, it is odd that a corporation with some of the top engineers and most brilliant minds would fail to take the necessary measures to prevent the type of breach that would warrant bringing in the NSA to clean up.

Even with the help of the NSA, attacks like these are nearly impossible to stop. In the case of the Google attack, users at Google, and the other targeted companies, visited malicious sites, that exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the Internet Explorer browser. The exploit downloaded an array of malware to the victim’s computer automatically and transparently. These programs then unfurled themselves into the network using sophisticated encryption to prevent detection.

Reactions

Upon learning of the proposed partnership, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), was quoted as stating that any relationship between the two would be “very problematic.”

“We would like to see Google develop stronger security standards and safeguards for protecting themselves,” he said. “But everyone knows the NSA has two missions: One is to ensure security, and the other is to enable surveillance.”

In a counter move, EPIC has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking NSA communications with Google regarding Google’s failure to encrypt Gmail and cloud computing services. The purpose of this, according to Rotenberg, is to find out what role the NSA has played in shaping privacy and security standards for Google’s services. This request was followed up by a lawsuit against the National Security Agency and the National Security Council, seeking a key document governing national cybersecurity policy.

In addition to concerns raised by EPIC and other privacy rights groups, the move calls into question Google’s promises made when joining the Global Network Initiative. As a member of the GNI, along with Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google has pledged to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy despite increasing government pressure to comply with domestic laws and policies in ways that may conflict with these ideals.

Not all experts are concerned. James Lewis, director and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), believes that it is unlikely this potential partnership will involve the sharing of personal data. Claiming that Google is more likely to only be interested in having the NSA take a look at its networks and help it identify potential weaknesses, “It has nothing to do with intelligence. That point appears to have been missed,” Lewis said, “I don’t have any direct knowledge, but that is my assumption in this case.”

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Google, NSA Partnership Brings New Privacy Concerns

I was really looking forward to this session at LeadsCon 2010 and wasn’t alone as the session was over two-thirds full. Jesse Pujji, Ampush Media Co-Founder, moderated a panel consisting of Jay Hallberg, Co-Founder & VP Marketing for Spicework and Thomas Koletas, Senior Vice President of Advertising Sales for Madison Logic.

After brief introductions panelists were asked to share one big vertical in the B2B lead generation space. Jay Hallberg said that global information technologies are a market section with a $45 billion marketing budget that has plenty of room to grow.

Tom Koletas agreed with Mr. Hallberg, but he also saw the technology vertical as a large opportunity in the B2B space this year. He felt that technology is such a strong vertical because affiliates have been promoting it for years and years. He also shared that he thought “white papers” were the primary means by which people generate leads.

Mr. Pujji asked each panelist for what they thought were the biggest differences between B2B and B2C in lead generation. Mr. Hallberg’s response was the community of IT professionals and their ability to drive huge volume. In contrast, he felt B2C volume was relatively low, citing 20,000 page views a month as the measure of success in B2C.

Mr. Koletas said he felt B2B was a more collaborative buying process where content producers are outstanding lead generators. He also mentioned construction as a vertical to watch.  He used VOIP as an example of a more commodity-based vertical typical of B2B lead generation. Additionally, he felt that B2C forms are short with only a couple of “points” (i.e. name and email, to fill out the form) while B2C typically requires 18 points. Database, management software, and CRM were a couple examples he used to support the long form typically found in B2B lead generation marketing.

Mr. Koletas felt that, “B2B lead generation has a greater shelf life than B2C.” He also felt that the leads are typically more qualified in B2B. He used an example of working with CDW, if they were into data mining, and said he could get in contact with the guy buying leads for Liberty Mutual – that would be a great lead.

When posed the question, “What kind of advice would you give from B2C to B2B?” Koletas felt B2C lead gen was really good at distribution, but that the industry needed to learn how to scale. He also liked the innovative ways B2C lead gen marketers used social media to get offers in front of consumers.

Learning to save time in innovation and training are some key pointers B2C marketers could take away from the B2B industry according to Mr. Hallberg. He also referenced communication and networking, that IT professionals were ahead of Twitter in terms of finding ways to find each other and share information.

Mr. Koletas stated that he expects to see a more diverse scope of verticals including construction, lead gen, plastics, and manufacturing emerging in 2010. He also emphasized that data is really important—that the way we collect leads is permission based.

The session ended with each panelist sharing where they would invest if they had $1 million to play with right now. Mr. Hallberg stated that he sees an affinity between IT and maintenance operations and he also sees an opportunity in sales training and education. While Mr. Koletas felt finance might also make a big comeback this year.

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LeadsCon Coverage: B2B Lead Generation in a B2C World