My first session of the day and it promises to be a really exciting one. Social Media is always a good crowd-puller, but in the hugely competitive affiliate space, Social Media participation has it’s pitfalls.

Here we go…

Andrew is a self-proclaimed geek and former affiliate. Currently working with a big agency and experienced in managing legal social/gaming issues, (particularly the celebrity death odds.)

Participation is underpinned by a required understanding of the law.

We’re starting off in 2000 when Lawrence Godfrey goes after Demon Internet and sets a 15k precedent for content host responsibility. Blame him…

Andrew himself had a client video removed from YouTube, due to a trademark referenced. Less than 100 views before it was pulled.

The Electronic Commerce Directive “ISPs should not have to monitor everything.” However in France Louis Vuitton and eBay are at constant war over fake goods. eBay does offer some policy (the VeRo program) to try to protect IP.

How does this affect You?

Blogs

Post moderation and pre-moderation. Post comment goes live, approved after the fact.) Pre – moderation approving by consideration, actually puts you i a difficult position, as you have complicity approved something.

Spartacus Order – anonymous comment trolls need to watch their backs. This order means the person responsible for comments must identify themselves.

John Doe: 18thc law. A court can still proceed without knowing the identity of a perpetrator.

In the UK, the  Consumer Protection Act. A financial interest must be disclosed e.g. if I chat on social media “Betfair is great”, then I need to disclose my financial relationship, or am technically breaking the law.

Yahoo! Answers example – comment in Car Insurance from a guy who gets a lot of thumbs up, however ‘always’ recommends the same insurance co. Naughty.

Gambling in Europe

EU free trade is fuzzy when it comes to gambling and proceedings take a very long time to change. One law is that there is coming EU tracking law. Opt out of tracking must be clear.

Other Effects – Google

The algorithm knows gambling content.

That’s the cautionary tale, now for the advantages.

Affiliates are not stupid

Affiliates don’t have a brand committee (nimble and flexible structure)

On average affiliates are 3525% quicker than brands to make site changes

Merchant Disadvantage

One client took two years to put a link on their homepage

One bank took one year to add an RSS feed to a page for a 10k bill from their design agency.

Another took 7 months to decide to use Google Local and 1 year to actually get on there.

Lesson: affiliate organisations are the perfect size, scale and mindset to successfully participate in social media.

Virtual Networking

Nimble affiliates can easily participate in Twitter.

TRAPS

Blogging

Blogger, Mixx, Friendfeed, Twitter, Twhirl – one blog can grow into so many means of promotion it is an easy trap to end up exceeding time spent “being social”. Do monitor your time against benefit.

Dumb Merchants

Andrew himself was previously an affiliate of New Line Cinema – When Lord of The Rings launched, they offered an affiliate scheme on a golden ring for £200 which got a lot of traction in some social media, (incredulity of price for a replica ring) which lead to a lot of impressions, high-interest. Social/viral effect can lead merchants to suspect some form of click incentive. Andrew got kicked off this particular program.

Biggest Tip

NEVER offer legal, financial or medical advice in any way, shape or form.

Also – careful when providing content related to celebs. If it is true = copyright, if it’s private = Intellectual Property.

Moving onto Gamer Networks and the Prime Candidates for Affiliate Social Activities.

Raptr is a perfect hunting ground for casual gamers.

Real-time in Twitter, links text ad links related to trending topics.

Outbrain’s Outcloud A great way to collate blog content into a social content form including thumbnail image content. Costs $10 a month, but huge potential for impressions and clicks. Highly recommended.

Also – don’t forget good old Yahoo! pipes.

In summary – Social Media is a world of opportunity for affiliates, but just be aware of the rules of play, and how social viral campaigns may not convert in the way that is expected by the merchant.

QUESTIONS

What about duplicate content?

Don’t duplicate your own content. Don’t push the same post to multiple distribution points. Check Google from a content dupe perspective. Make sure your post is live on your own site first. Establish authority of source.

PR are the sites good distribution sources?

Yes. Particularly if you can get something into Google News. NYT picked up a press release about how US prisoners are forbidden to play Dungeons and Dragons. Great story, which was picked up by the blogs already for two days before NYT picked it up.

Following this evening’s iGB Affiiate Awards, the conference and exhibition proper starts on Friday. theMediaFlow will be in full attendence so if you see me, Stephen or Sarah; please say Hi!

Friday I’m attending and liveblogging the following sessions, so if you can’t make any of these sessions or can only come for one day; be sure to bookmark, subscribe etc. I’ll also be tweeting-up the place #LAC.

Friday.

11:30 AM Social Media 101

Andrew Girdwood of Bigmouthmedia takes us through some of the most crucial social media concerns for affiliates, such as; legal considerations, Google and Facebook view of affiiates in social media, the crackdown on lead-gen and more.

12:15 PM Demon SEO

(My two favourite words in one session. What’s not to love?)

SEO heavyweights Bob Rains, David Naylor, Ziv Descalu and Frank Watson, will be taking us through Advanced SEO techniques and telling us what really counts.

13:45 PM Hunting for that Golden Link

Up to date strategies from a supremo SEO panel. Marcus Tandler, Ralph Tegtmeier (Fantomaster), Christoph Cemper and Sebastian Wentzell.

15:15 PM KEYNOTE: Bing – The New Search Experience

An overview of the Bing experience, plus insights into online gaming search trends which should be invaluable. Speakers are Cedric Chambaz and Adam Goodman of Microsoft Advertising.

I’m liveblogging a selection of the conference sessions, and there are many more excellent panels and presentations in the Friday program. Here’s the full schedule.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the liveblogs and the Saturday schedule.

This year however I’m speaking, reporting, live blogging and all sorts.

I’m really excited having been off the scene for a while. Also I’m a little nervous about seeing and meeting all those people I have spent the past year stalking, befriending, admiring and engaging with on Twitter. I have a bad habit of seeing celebrities in London and thinking we’re old friends, so I’m not confident in my avatar recognition skills. Please don’t be offended if I walk past you. Grab me and explain who you are and we’ll get on like a house on fire I’m sure. Or you may get dragged into a room at SES and interviewed for SEO-Chicks. (If you’re really, really lucky )

First up is #LAC, or London Affiliate Conference (Gaming). I’m speaking on a panel about advanced social media strategies; lead by social media expert @JudithLewis. Judith has been online, since there’s been an ‘online’ and truly knows her onions when it comes to social media, search engine optimisation, paid search, quality chocolate and indeed most other things. I’m excited to meet my fellow panellists, who are Sarah Goodwin of Bloom Media; Matt Nash of OOSOCIAL and Zoe Sands from Cisco.

We have a tough gig though as we’re on Saturday (30th January) last session of the day, on the last day, on the session before the partayyyy! BUT. We’re giving away free stuff including wine and chocolate and I may even have something pretty speshup my sleeve.

So please come and heckle/learn/laugh/eat/drink/snooze/whatever: just come! You will certainly pick up some gems of information, that could help increase your audience and brand rapport; even if you’re an experienced social media communicator.

If on the other hand, if you have no idea what ‘#LAC’ (hashtag) means, or why I’ve prefixed a name with an “@” – then you have to come!

I’m not going to call this a ‘definitive’ list, as the game rules are evolving every day, but I’m hoping that this information will serve as a thorough consideration of tried and tested business models that may fit your existing idea – or add a complementary revenue stream to your web business that maybe you hadn’t considered.

It is important to mention that many of these business models have their roots in traditional commerce models. Conceptually the model may be the same offline as online; however the mechanics and performance metrics differ in the online world.

Advertising Model

Overview: I have an audience. You pay me to promote your product/message to my audience.

(OK, I know! We all know what an advert is, however some of the other business models that will be featured are less traditional and involve more technical explanations; so for consistency I’m defining them all).

Who Pays Who?: Advertiser pays the publisher (website, ezine, application) to display their message to the source’ audience, according to the nature of the advertising product sold.

Specific Commercial Variants

CPM – (cost per thousand impressions), is commonly used to price online display advertising. Many online publishers use this as their primary business model. As a new or small publisher you may want to grow your audience and collect demographic data about your visitors to assist in a pricing benchmark.  Other variables also influence the price you can set, such as the visitor tendency to interact with advertising. Huge choice exists in the display advertising market, as publishers are free to sell their own display advertising inventory using an ad serving platform, or select an advertising network to fill inventory for them.

CPC – (cost per click), is used primarily for text- based advertisements. Google Adwords and AdSense are both examples of cost-per click advertising. In this case, the advertiser bids to have their ad shown when a user searches for a keyword that is relevant to the ad (or is reading content that contains the relevant keyword – in the case of Adsense) and pays only when a click is received, regardless of how many page impressions the advert may receive. This isn’t a business model that anyone can launch. Apart from the fact that the sponsored search market is pretty much sewn up, be aware that Yahoo! owns the original Goto/Overture patent – known as the 361 patent. Instead its best to act as a carrier of text based advertising as a search or content partner.

CPL – (cost per lead), is technically the same as cost per click, in that the advertiser pays for a ‘visit’ action; however this terminology is most often used in situations when user interest tends to have been further qualified.

CPA – (cost per acquisition), is used to describe conversion based advertising. In this case the advertiser pays only when their conversion metric has been achieved. A conversion could be a product sale or a new customer registration.  A CPA model can be a difficult model to launch a commercial website with. It may be best to operate a CPL model until statistical performance inferences can be made about your traffic conversion rates.

Affiliate Model

Overview: I have an audience and website similar to yours. You pay me for directly selling or promoting your product to my audience, almost as if the product were my own!

Who Pays Who?: Advertiser pays its affiliate partners on referred-user-completion of a specified performance metric. An affiliation can often be a long term business model, often lasting as long as the commercial lifetime of the user’ consumption of the advertiser product(s).

Specific Commercial Variants

Reseller Affiliation – an affiliate is paid a percentage share of the total revenue derived from a purchase of the advertiser product, from the affiliate website. Such share of revenue may be a one-off percentage of sale or a lifetime value share.  Many software, application and domain distributors operate reseller programmes. Reselling tends to work well for digital and download products, as physical product distribution costs can be prohibitive for re-sale.

Lead Generation – an affiliate website has a qualified mechanism for the collection and onward distribution of a lead to an advertiser. Many financial service providers offer this type of affiliate programme. If you have a content web site established in the life insurance sector, you could add an enquiry form to collect all the relevant user data, and provide this information to a life insurance provider. Such lead generation mechanism could employ either a CPL or CPA model, however an affiliated relationship by the very definition of the term, is one of commonality and similarity, therefore conversion rates tend to be much higher with affiliate lead generation as opposed to a simple CPL advertisement on a non-affiliated site. Higher commission can therefore be established as the much of the promotion and user intention is qualified by the nature of the affiliate content, as opposed to advertising content. Lead generation affiliations may also operate on a revenue share basis. As an example many Bingo game providers will pay their affiliates a percentage of the gaming revenue spent by a referred user over the lifetime of that user.

Advertising and Affiliate models are the mainstay of the commercial web; therefore require a fair bit of reference in any overview of online commercial models – so don’t be put off by the fact that we’re still on ‘A’ at the end of part 1.

In part 2. I’m going to detail Auction, Brokerage and Donation models. Please do add your comments and additional advertising or affiliate variants I may have omitted. Feel free to suggest any models from A-D that I haven’t mentioned yet!

Final Note: You will no doubt notice that I have refrained from referencing or linking to any specific advertising programme, network or affiliate offer. As theMediaFlow is impartial it wouldn’t do to direct or ‘support by association’ in this particular post. If you want my personal opinion however; Tweet me up!

Resources:

Dosh Dosh: Well written, well researched and well informed blog aimed at beginners to making money online.

Digital Enterprise: Good theoretical content, from an academic perspective.

List of Top UK Affiiate Networks, from Richard Kershaw’s Quality Nonsense Blog.