At MediaTrust I am the “social media guy.” There are still factions of my company that don’t get what it is I do exactly. Social media is not an exact science and trying to explain it to someone that doesn’t understand services like Facebook or Twitter is going to have a hard time wrapping their mind around the value of things like podcasts and blogs. This applies to pretty much every company doing business today. For the past few years, I have been banging the drum on the importance of having a corporate blog strategy to everyone I meet. Yesterday Idris Mootee wrote a post that pretty much EXACTLY sums up what I have been trying to impress on people. He lists four key points that are key to your success:

1. You need credibility

2. You need to have a distinct perspective

3. Timeliness of relevant content

4. Balancing the corporate legal and strategic risks of posting vs. not posting

Check out his blog for more detail on each, but these are the bullet points. A successful blog has to have genuine intent. It has to be real, and it has to offer something other than the “me too” bandwagon-jumping I see too many companies fall prey to.

One final nugget of information I’d offer is don’t expect to make money off your corporate blog directly. I know, your business has enough cost centers, it doesn’t need another one, right? Wrong! If you follow the tips above and you put real effort forth, the amount of positive traction you will gain for your brand will be well worth it. Customers want to feel a connection to the companies they do business with. Offering a genuine perspective and a mechanism for your customers to provide feedback will be worth it’s weight in gold.

I reference Robert Scoble a lot on this blog. After all, he is a pioneer in this space and if you want to know which way the wind is blowing in social media, you BETTER know what he’s up to. That being said, I’ve been following his new gig over at Fast Company pretty closely. Obviously Fast Company is a well-respected brand in traditional business circles, but their foray into social media is fairly new. Bringing Scoble into the mix was a move that has been watched by a lot of people.

Scoble produces several shows for them. The one I’m focusing on for the purpose of this article is Workfast TV with his co-host Shel Israel. The premise of the show is a familiar format - Robert and Shel start off with some back and forth banter about what they did this past week, then they introduce their guest and proceed to have a discussion for the next 30 minutes or so.

It’s a trainwreck. First off, the vibe of the show is totally off. You have Scoble as the only one dressed in a suit and tie, while the rest are dressed more casually. Additionally his laptop is covered in tech stickers which totally negates any business look he’s trying to create. Second, the banter between Israel and Scoble is painfully hard to watch. Instead of being friends, you’d swear they met 5 minutes before the show. Attempts at jokes fall flat and are awkwardly laughed off. As a viewer it is uncomfortable to watch. Finally, the format is flawed. They sit around a table with the guest. While they’re bantering back and forth, the guest is sitting there uncomfortably wondering what to do with themselves. By the time they start referring to the guest in the third person, you start to cringe.

On a positive note, the production values are top-notch.

Ok, I know this was a very long-winded way to get to my point, but it was necessary for context. I posted a condensed and gentler version of the above critique in the comments of Workfast TV a couple of days ago. Guess what? The comment was deleted. Then, I started to see the bulk of the other users in the thread complaining that their comments had been deleted for being critical. Fast Company then chimed in… (Wait, I see they have now deleted their initial comments defending the deletion of user comments). So not only are they deleting unfavorable comments from users, they have seen fit to pull their initial defense of doing so. Wow.

That last piece just really cements my argument. Fast Company doesn’t get what social media is about. They thought that hiring Scoble would bring them instant audience and credibility - and it did. But now that is eroding quickly. After all, one of Scoble’s key mantras is that companies should be engaged with their consumers on the web. Fast Company has essentially thrown that way of thinking out the window.

I realize that Scoble and Israel have little or no say in Fast Company’s practices. I also understand that business is business, and they have to put food on the table. However, how do you build your career as a transparent blogger, then sit back and watch your personal brand be tarnished by a company using tactics that are the antithesis of your view of social media ? I reached out to Scoble on Twitter and Israel on his blog, and as of this posting there was no response from either of them. Are their hands tied? Does their silence mean they condone it?

I applaud companies for taking the leap and putting some money into the social web. The benefits can be tremendous for your traffic and your brand. But, you have to be willing to have a genuine conversation. You can’t put out a show about how companies are effectively using the web 2.0 world to their benefit, then turn around and censor unflattering feedback. Now, before Fast Company removed their corporate comment yesterday, they stated that they only removed negative attacks and said they were open to critiques of the show. That’s complete BS because my comment was deleted and it was a genuine piece of constructive feedback. Where is the two-way dialog in that example? Amazingly, Fast Company is actually going to be worse off in the web 2.0 space than they were before they started their social media initiatives. Instead of this being a brand-building effort, it’s now turning into brand repair.

What should you take away from Fast Company’s mistake?

1. Don’t jump into emerging media unless you really want to engage your customers in an open dialog.

2. Welcome and encourage genuine feedback in your forums and blogs. Don’t delete something because it doesn’t fit with your tightly-controlled marketing message.

3. Listen to feedback. Most of it is genuine, and although it may be painful to read, you may be able to learn from it and make something in your organization better.

4. Reward feedback, whether it’s negative or positive, by engaging participators with a response.

Scoble and Israel know these things. I bet they tell this stuff to companies everyday when they interview them. So is it not bizarre that they would work for a company that so clearly seems to hold an opposing view?

An affiliate marketing panel at the 2008 Internet Retailer Conference led by panel moderator George Michie from RKG allegedly turned into an unethical and irresponsible affiliate marketing bashing session. Linda Buquet at 5 Star Affiliate Programs reported in a post that about 400 merchants attended a panel session that turned into a 90 minute rant about what scum-bags affiliates are.

The session led to this video interview with Larry Joseloff, VP of content at Shop.org talking about the state of affiliate marketing, where it’s going, and how it needs to reinvent itself. He makes some valid points but for the most part seems a bit out of touch with the inner workings of the affiliate marketing channel. He also didn’t really offer any thoughts on ways to improve the channel.

This issue is nothing new to the industry and is actually one that is being addressed with the formation of the PMA “Performance Marketing Alliance”which will be working with affiliates, merchants, networks and service providers to set standards and govern this very large and valuable marketing channel.

The disturbing part of this recent event is how the panel was poorly led by its moderator George Michie -  who not only led this unethical and irresponsible style of panel moderation, but then continues to speak out of both sides of his mouth with a backhanded apology that instead re-bashed affiliate marketing without one shred of data to substantiate his rant. This not only demonstrates how a panel should not be moderated, it also demonstrates poor leadership that creates a negative image of the entire online marketing industry’s integrity. Here’s an excerpt:

Finally, I implied in my talk that most affiliates were “bad guys”. That was wrong. I apologize to those I offended. However, I do believe that the vast majority of the $3 Billion in affiliate commissions that will be paid out this year will go to cheaters, and other programs that add no value for retailers.

Does this not put him in the same ethics category as the few affiliates (out of the many) who he rants about? Is it not a moderators job to be a leader and provide an objective platform on all sides of the panel discussion? Why was there no representation from the affiliate marketing side of the business to speak about the channel? It seems that he was instead more interested in taking the opportunity to self promote his PPC channel and services.

Shawn Collins has posted a sound response on his blog “Consultants Can Fix Affiliate Marketing” that challenges and counters George Michie’s childish BS! There is also a good affiliate discussion in ABestWeb regarding the panels lack of affiliate representation. 

You can read my response in the comments HERE.

Who has business partners that they can’t contact and build relationships with? How many people get financial statements with the understanding that they are only 90% accurate? How many marketers want to build campaigns in one channel and not be able to leverage them in another? How many companies want to be forced into paying fees for services that ineffectively bridge gaps that are actually created by the service provider? How many companies want to be forced into silos and high switching costs as the result of a vendor’s strategy? Who wants redundancy and inefficiency due to a lack of standards?

Well, at this point – thousands of advertisers and publishers in the current affiliate marketing models. Or, at least, they are made to accept these compromises.

Why? – I think there are basically two reasons:

1. Affiliate marketing is relatively narrow and under served. It has not gotten the attention that other online channels have had in terms of standardization, technology advancement and channel integration.

2. Vendors and networks that control the market have not needed to evolve because of their clout. They’ve used this clout to create closed networks, proprietary standards and high switching costs. Some changes toward what clients are asking for now, could result in loss of control and revenue.

Are there better ways? – of course! Many networks, vendors and clients are talking about the changes that need to be made, but the industry has still not truly moved toward more accurate tracking, open communication, universal standards, more sophisticated ‘action’ metrics or integrated channel/partner models.

I think that in any industry, customer compromises flag areas from which the next generation of innovators emerge. And that’s where we need to focus as an industry ready for that next evolutionary stage.

Today, our pay for performance division, Advaliant, jumps into the arena of social networking. This move is long overdue, but we wanted to make sure we did our homework and positioned ourself in a way that made sense to our affiliates and our advertisers.

Our rollout centers around the idea of micro-blogging; short updates about new offers, news in the affiliate marketing space, and our perspective on the state of the industry. In addition to our presence on larger platforms like Twitter, MySpace, and facebook, we’ll also be participating in communities like Hi5, Bebo, Tumblr, Plurk, Xanga, Mashable, and Pownce. We believe that Advaliant’s journey into social media is more comprehensive than any other pay for performance network’s is to date.

Over the next few months you’ll see lots of great content coming from the Advaliant camp. In addition to our social networking activities across the web, we’ll also be doing some great stuff on our internal web properties including affiliate marketing podcast episodes (see our recent interview with David Taber) and the launch of the Advaliant blog.

We have some of the top minds in the pay for performance space working at Advaliant. Over the next few months I think you’ll come to see that in a big way. The first person I’d like to introduce you to is Larry Markovitz who works in Business Development. He’ll be the voice of Advaliant through our micro-blogging activities and will help steer you towards interesting content in our space. We know you’ll get to appreciate his intelligence, charm, passion, and wit - just like we have here at MediaTrust. If you’d like to start by following him at Twitter, you can do so HERE.

Not a day goes by that I don’t have a conversation with someone about how using Twitter can help their business. Inevitably, the question I always get asked is “how do we make money using things like Twitter or social media as a whole?” I then sigh, take a deep breath, and recite the same speech I’ve given a thousand times before:

SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT ABOUT SALES OR DIRECT REVENUE, IT IS ABOUT DRIVING TRAFFIC AND BUILDING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT WITH YOUR BRAND!

Comcast has lit up the interwebs lately because of their use of Twitter. I used to be a Comcast customer and getting support from them was near impossible. I have to be honest, I was totally shocked when I heard of their foray into the Twittersphere. I started doing some research and was amazed at the level of personal attention I saw them giving to their customers - in a very public way.

Why is Comcast doing this? My guess is that someone high enough in that organization finally realized the impact that word-of-mouth has on your bottom line. Do a search for “Comcast customer service” and 8 of the 10 first-page entries are all negative postings. There’s even a YouTube video of a Comcast tech sleeping on a customer’s couch (ouch!).

How does this make Comcast money? Well, go back to my all-caps-bolded-sentence above - it doesn’t. In fact, it is costing them a bit to implement this effort. What it is doing in spades is putting their customer service in a favorable light for the first time. People are Twittering their frustrations with the cable company and someone is actually saying “I hear your frustrations and I want to help!” The icing on the cake is that it is being done in public view and people are taking notice. When I Google “Comcast Social Media,” I find a ton of articles talking about how Comcast is embracing change and trying to cut through the clutter of corporate bureaucracy. Clearly their strategy is paying off.

I stumbled across an interview with Advaliant President, Jivan Manhas, on Bernard Griffiths’ blog. Obviously, with Advaliant being a part of MediaTrust, I have my biases. When you read this interview, what do you get from it?

Jivan’s thoughts on why Advaliant is different:

“We are taking advantage of various different social feature sets, semantic A.I. programming as well as a large amount of feedback from our affiliates and advertisers to build out a cutting edge, industry leading technology that will allow us to evolve into the premier online brand for performance marketing.  I realize that is a bold statement but unfortunately affiliate marketing is seen as the ugly step child of the marketing world by many companies and if we want to survive as an industry we all need to take our industry up a few notches and start attracting the big dollars from the Fortune 100 companies.” 

A bold statement, yes, but let’s face it, affiliate marketing has some shady characters. A lot of the reputation the space has been branded with is well-deserved. Advaliant, under Jivan’s leadership, is trying to rise above that, even when that means turning down easy money now with less desirable partners.

What are some of the criteria you look at as an advertiser or a publisher when choosing your affiliate network? 

Like many of you, I spend a fair portion of my week working in facebook. Building up your network is starting to yield some nice business opportunities. We’ve certainly seen the benefit here at MediaTrust.

The other day I was going through the “people you may know” section and a person in the social media space was suggested to me as a “friend.” I sent a friend request. I’ve gone through these motions many times before. Usually I get a response that I have been confirmed as a friend and both our networks are another person stronger - mutually beneficial I would think. However, something strange happened. I got a response back from this person (we’ll call him Joe Nobody), saying he didn’t recall meeting me in person and that instead of being his “friend,” I could be added as a “fan.”

I found this puzzling for two reasons. First, most of the connections I have on facebook are people I’ve never met in person. We live in a virtual world. Lots of business and personal connections occur through cyber-space. Why was it so shocking that a person you’ve never met in person would request “friend” status on facebook? Second, the notion that I’m not good enough to be your friend, but I can be your fan is absurd. Are you kidding me? This guy was a virtual nobody. I had befriended him because we had mutual career interests. To be rebuffed only served to illustrate how awful he must be at his job in social media. In fact, further review of his “fans” showed only three people. Oops, I guess others were put off by his ego-driven facebook elitism.

Social media is about collaboration. Haven’t we railed against traditional media because they talk at us and not with us? They want to control the conversation and we want a true open dialogue. By offering someone “fan” status on facebook, you’re eliminating the very component that makes social media important. Someone that claims to work in social media should know this. 

I have a network that continues to grow daily. Some of my facebook friends include: Robert Scoble, Arianna Huffington, Veronica Belmont, Andrew Baron, and Tim Bourquin - all giants in the new media space. They all could have asked me to be a fan, but none did. Instead, they graciously accepted my friend request. Joe Nobody chose not to and now he’s being left out of the conversation. In fact, Scoble commented on his blog a few weeks ago in regards to Twitter that it’s not how many people follow you that’s important, it’s how many people you follow that really helps expand your knowledge. He’s right.

This post can be applied to any company thinking about diving into the social media space. Is your goal to control a conversation? Is it to be the most popular person in the room? Or, is your intent genuine? Do you really want to learn from your network and be a part of the discussion? For Joe Nobody, it was clearly about popularity and who he thinks he is. Don’t be a Nobody.

There is a great article over at Go Big Always today about online media companies dropping the ball when it comes to social media.

“You’d think media companies would be all over social media. I mean, media is their business. No one should be better than they are at leading the way. They’re sitting on a gold mine of assets. Awesome writers, tons of video and images, lots of “Social Objects.” Media companies are the ones who can get the conversations started and keep it going.

But they’re getting their ass handed to them by blogs. Bloggers are on top of the active conversations and participate in the dialogue without forcing you to jump through hoops before you can chime in. They, like companies in other industries embracing social software and principles, are beating the crap out of the later adopters.”

There are essentially two schools of thoughts at work here. The first is that you force participants to sign up to your site - name, email, password etc. This allows you to gather their information and monetize it down the road. The second, better option, is that you let people contribute freely to the conversation with no strings attached.

Instead of forcing them into giving up their personal information, how about giving them something of value in exchange for it? If your site offers something that unique, eventually users will sign up for more access. The true benefit of social media is engagement. When you force people to disclose personal information in exchange for the privilege of interaction, you are putting up an unnecessary wall in front of them. In the end, you’re defeating the whole purpose of utilizing these social tools in the first place.

Media companies have always been shortsighted. You only have to look as far as the RIAA suing their customers to see what I mean. Many companies, unfortunately, still seem to be heading down the wrong road. 

It’s probably no secret to readers that I am a producer for the PodShow network. My show, American Cliche, has been part of their stable of shows for almost two years. During the bulk of that time my main contact there was Richard Brewer-Hay in their talent relations department. Richard was my favorite person at PodShow. Besides being a fun guy to be around, I always knew that when I asked him a question he would tell me the truth, point blank. I respect Richard a lot.

In January I got a call from him letting me know that he was leaving PodShow to start eBay’s blog. I was excited for him because it seemed like a great opportunity, but I didn’t really understand the scope of the project. To be honest, I feared this would be a tool of the PR department to try and falsely embrace the conversations happening in social media. However, today I read an interview on Fortune Small Business with Richard. Apparently eBay has agreed to a hands-off approach on the blog. Richard has complete freedom to write whatever he wants, unedited. It was also interesting to learn that he has “all-access” to every facet of the company from the CEO on down.

What does this mean for eBay? It has long been a concern of sellers that their voices have fallen on deaf ears.  In fact, to show their disapproval of fee changes, many top sellers staged a boycott a few weeks ago. According to Richard, eBay Ink, will be direct line of communication for eBay’s users to voice concerns and get a peek behind the scenes at every level. While the blog has yet to launch, it will be interesting to see what the content looks like. Will it really be unedited? There will no doubt be guidelines that Richard will have to follow in terms of what he writes. Or will there? Maybe eBay will use the Robert Scoble/Microsoft model and allow him to exist as an island - far removed from the sharp claws of the PR department.

I hope they do this right. eBay has a real opportunity here to engage their customers. In fact, the best thing a company can do in the digital age is make their customers feel like part of the dialogue. How transparent will eBay actually be? That remains to be seen. However, the fact that Richard Brewer-Hay is leading this charge gives me confidence that it’ll be done right. You can bet that a lot of eyes will be on them as they launch eBay Ink. If it goes well, expect to see more following suit.