Christopher and I chat about the New Media Expo and some of the trends we noticed during our many conversations with individuals and companies here.

We’re seeing a big trend here at the Expo: How do I monetize my content? Obviously one of the key factors we’re hearing about is quality. Producers and show creators are trying to take their craft to the next level so that they can compete for the ad-dollars of larger companies. UGC of the YouTube variety is not cutting it anymore and this industry knows that it needs to step up and produce great looking and sounding content.

Below is a picture of our interview with Personal Life Media’s Susan Bratton. She talked to us about the lengthy process for her to get an advertiser on her network. Look for that interview here in the coming weeks.

AFFILIATE PARTICIPATION NEEDED

Peter Figueredo’s post on Revenews regarding marketing data makes me think he must have been reading my mind last week. There is far too little affiliate performance marketing research and data for such a big segment of the online marketing industry. We have been working on our new performance marketing platform that will be launching this year and have found very little data compared to other online marketing vertices’s. Our Advaliant performance marketing division has been conducting our own research and focus groups to pro-actively collect data that can be used to develop solutions for the affiliate marketing community.

Most of the existing data is skewed to the advertiser and merchant perspective. The affiliate side of the business is not properly represented in a way that can help solution and service providers be more proactive in empowering affiliates with tools to help them grow their business.

For this reason Peter’s company NETexponent has launched an affiliate marketing research case study that consists of 26 SHORT QUESTIONS (SURVEY). Those who take a few minutes to fill in the survey will be provided with a copy of the data.

The survey goal is to give the affiliate community a clear understanding of :

• How to best communicate with affiliates
• Tools and information affiliates need and find missing in the market
• a better understanding of who affiliates are and their challenges

THE SURVEY IS HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL (note to all affiliates) the survey data shared is only aggregate information.

We strongly urge everyone to participate. We know there are needs in the market that are not voiced in a way that allows companies in our community to help create value for affiliate and advertiser partners. This data helps us to help you (no i am not quoting the movie Jerry Maguire)

Other sources of affiliate data include:

• AffStat
• Jupiter Research on Affiliate Marketing
• Marketing Sherpa’s Affiliate Study
• Performics Affiliate Study

One of the most powerful things about the web is the seemingly infinite archive of content. Want to see Doug Flutie’s hail mary pass on YouTube, you can. How about Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Superbowl? Yep, it’s all there on the web for anyone to view at anytime.

This weekend I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Starring opposite Harrison Ford is Cate Blanchett. Seeing her on-screen made me want to go online and look for some interviews. Oh yeah, we shot one for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in January. It got me thinking - how many other people go back and look for this type of content?

I started to look at some of the stats from the nine episodes we did for this year’s SBIFF. Immediately following the festival, the viewership numbers were hovering around the 1.1 million mark. In the three and a half months since, we’ve done an additional 80,000 views. Keep in mind that is without any additional promotion of the work. Those additional numbers are strictly from people that either searched for that specific type of content or happened on it randomly.

It has become ingrained in us through traditional media to look at viewer numbers at the time of broadcast or publication, and determine reach and value based on those initial numbers. I think that is a mistake. I believe there is real value in the longtail that online content offers - including monetization opportunities.

Imagine adding a flash overlay to the SBIFF Cate Blanchett interview promoting the new Indiana Jones movie. You can generate instant, timely revenue using content that already exists. The same could be done with pre-roll and post-roll technology. Is money being left on the table? I think that content producers and advertisers alike need to get in a room and start looking at back catalog. The work has been done, all you have to do is pair it with a relevant advertising campaign.

The NY affiliate tax issue has ignited several issues and initiatives. It now seems that Texas might be following along with CA. The issue has caused debate over the need for affiliate marketing association or to work with established groups such as the IAB.

We participated in the IAB public policy meeting this week on the new Can-Spam legislation. The IAB has been very focused on the privacy issues legislation and it effect on our interactive markets. In the last segment of the meeting MediaTrust’s CMO Trip Foster and ValueClick opened the affiliate tax discussion. The public policy team made several things very clear that don’t surprise me at all. The law is not very well thought out and applies a traditional retail tax model to the internet e-commerce model. It treats NY affiliates as physical store fronts, and physical store fronts have very clear limitations and physical boundaries. Interactive store fronts have no borders or boundaries. Traffic can come in from anywhere in the world at anytime. This is internet 101 NY state! You need to look at this thru a different lens and apply different model. Each state has different taxes on goods. There are no current mechanisms or the infrastructure in place to be able to handle every global transaction across every state.

So now we have a knee jerk reaction created by a knee jerk law. Merchants are either fighting this like Amazon, or walking away from 3,400 affiliates like Overstock. Others are following each of the 2 paths creating extremely alarming reactive behavior. Not Good. Do the math. If this spreads across other states. mean while we are in a economy that needs stimulation, jobs and productivity. This law is counter productive to the current economy. Affiliate marketers make a living from online marketing. These are real small businesses not hobbies. Many have affiliates have started to help counter the impact the economic contraction on their lives. Affiliate or the work at home model is an important part of the emerging long tail economy. This is a meaningful trend. With significant numbers being generated around the 8 billion mark and growing. This is a meaningful part of large companies down thru the value chain to the SMB’s and service providers that have been created thru the new interactive economy.

It is very important that the affiliate marketing community come together and have a voice. State legislation needs to take the time to work with the community, merchants, affiliate networks and affiliates to create a law that is very well thought out and applies to E-commerce. Not traditional retail. Sites and IP addresses can move. Physical stores cannot. NY state shoppers also transact on NY state affiliates sites when they are out on NY state. What is the ripple effect and impact on the interactive marketing community and the interactive economy in relationship to the bigger economic picture? Proper methodical legislation is needed that looks at the entire puzzle. Not one section of the puzzle, and this puzzle has many many pieces in all sizes, shapes and colors. It is NOT black and white.

We will be working with our community and participating in further IAB public policy around this issue and will post as the legislation moves along. We strongly encourage everyone to participate in raising awareness by being vocal and asking questions thru the forums, blogs, service providers or submitting a petition to affiliatepetition@gmail.com . Everyones voice counts no matter how big or small.

Here are some helpful links:

affiliatepetition@gmail.com is an anonymous point of contact to send in your thoughts or petition

Full text of law located here

5 Star Affiliate Program’s Linda Buquet proactive call to action commentary and updates (a must read)

Kevin Webster of the 72 Kilowatts blog started a post on ABestWeb, “Merchants who ALREADY collect New York Sales Tax.”

ABestWeb dedicated area to legal issues for New York affiliate marketers

ABW of merchants who have dropped New York affiliates.

ShareAsales Brian Littleton’s network position and thoughts commentary

Revenew’s Heather Paulson’s “Interview With Members of the NY State Tax Dept”

Shaun Collin’s Affiliate Blog commentary

I’m the kind of person that doesn’t like RSS readers. I know, it should be illegal for social media types to even say that, but it’s true. As inefficient as it is, I would rather take the time and go to my favorite sites to see what’s new. After all, a site owner put’s forth the time and effort create a compelling on-site experience - who am I to cut that piece out?

I have been hearing about this RSS reader called Snackr and I decided to take a closer look. From Snackr’s site:

It’s an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. When you see a title that looks interesting, you can click on it to pop up the item in a window.

The install process was a piece of cake. It uses Adobe AIR technology which makes it easier to run cross-platform apps using AJAX and Flash. After a painless install, I dropped in some feeds from a few of my favorite sites: Web Strategy By Jeremiah Owyang, Scobleizer, Jason Calacanis, CNN, Digg, and of course, Relevantly Speaking. Instantly Snackr started to stream headlines from these feeds across the bottom of my screen using an unobtrusive ticker. I was able to move the ticker to the top, bottom, left, or right of the screen. I elected to move it to left-side of my second monitor. Now, when I see a headline or an image that interests me, I can click on it, get an excerpt of the content, and continue on to the full piece if I like.

The only gripe I have, and this is really minor, is that you can’t resize the ticker to be wider or shorter. That would give it that little bit of extra customization that could come in handy. Other than that, I think it’s a damn fine little app.

What I can’t figure out is Snackr’s business model. You don’t have to give them any information to sign up or download the application, so it must be an ad play. We’ve dabbled in the RSS reader realm here at MediaTrust with a product called widgetQube. The thinking on our end is that we’d insert relevant ads into the news items and monetize it that way. Even though Snackr doesn’t have any ads yet, that would be my guess as to their end game. Hey, everybody has to make a living, so I’m not opposed to a few targeted ads occasionally.

Do you use Snackr? widgetQube? Do you have another favorite?

The power of social media demonstrates how information flows rapidly around a very new and troubling issue. There is a rising tide that the affiliate marketing community needs to pay close attention to. The New York State affliate program tax has been quietly gaining a head of steam.

The buzz started yesterday when Overstock.com pulled its New York State affiliate marketing program. The Twitter marketing community lit up as the news traveled across the social web. I was Twittering with @affiliateTips Shaun Collins (who first picked up the story) that this was the beginning of a problematic trend. States wanting tax dollars act like herds of animals looking for food - even if it means putting small business owners out of business in these already trying economic times. Bravo Elliot Spitzer and Governor Patterson! Immediately @5StarAffiliate shot us and @techcrunch a Tweet that California is now looking to follow New York. Kiplinger has the coverage of the CA tax warning.

Overstock’s affiliate program manager Ryan Sorensen shared a link to Overstock’s response letter with more details and that he felt other large retailers were soon to follow. Amazon filed a complaint in State Supreme Court in Manhattan objecting to the new law. The problem is that the new tax kicks in on June 1st which means that online retailers can’t hold out for resolution of the Amazon complaint.

All this being said, we cannot sit around and wait to see where this goes. The very large and fragmented affiliate marketing community needs to come together and get involved to address this issue before it exceeds our grasp. We need to stand up as solutions & service providers and act on behalf of, and protect, our community and affiliates. We at MediaTrust have reached out to the IAB to see what actions are suggested. If you would like to work together as a collective on this issue, please contact MediaTrust thru the following email: affiliatepetition@gmail.com

This is an important issue that affects the livelihood of our industry. Lets join together to advance our cause.

[Updated - Want a private beta invite code? Read on and see how]

So I was watching the roll out of Twitterfone the other day via Twhirl and tossed out a request for an invite to the private beta. Within moments, I received a direct message from @patphelan, one of the creators of Twitterfone, with an invite code, and my promise to write about the service.

What Twitterfone does is allow me to dial into a unique phone number and speak my tweets. This is extremely important to me as I tend to be on the road often, and will be great when I want to tweet out to my peeps about a event, a meeting or just a shout out where hands free is required (driving) or when the 140 character limit of Twitter isn’t reasonable to capture what I want to say.

After the prompt, I speak my tweet, hang up and in typically less than a minute my message appears in my Twitter stream with a TinyUrl that links back to the original message. This link is beneficial in many ways. I can see using this to capture an idea that i need to archive and share, which as a designer happens frequently. Sometimes I feel like Bill Blazejowski from Night Shift: “What if you mix the mayonnaise in the can, WITH the tunafish? Or… hold it! Chuck! I got it! Take LIVE tuna fish, and FEED ‘em mayonnaise! Oh this is great.” [speaks into tape recorder Twitterfone ] “Call Starkist!”

One of the coolest things to me about Twitterfone is that it is all tech driven, as pointed out by Socialized, a social media PR consultancy. The call into Twitterfone is handled by sophisticated AI that transcribes my message into text and posting to my Twitter account. Below is the another Tweet with Twitterfone. It properly transcribed Pomeranians, even knowing to capitalize it, yet choked on the word Guinness (which to me is sort of comical as he is from Cork, Ireland.)

This morning, I called in again to create a Tweet for this article, but was met with mixed results. It could be that a.) Madonna’s new record is on repeat in the studio here, or that b.) the service is still in private beta and the kinks are getting worked out. I would image that the folks at Twitterfone have been working night and day to tweak the intelligence. Just don’t forget what happens when the perfect AI is running the ship.

My call can be heard here, and what I was saying was “I heart Twitterfone and I would say that even if I was paid to.”

But these small items aside, I would say it has been a very successful launch for Twitterfone, and I intend to use it more often in my bag of social media tools and services as I can see the value, both today and in the future as Twitterfone continues to evolve. Congrats goes out to the whole team, who I understand built this application as a “side gig” while running other companies.

I am going to talk with Twitterfone today and see if we can’t wrangle up some hard to find and much sought after Twitterfone Beta invites.

[UPDATED: Shortly after posting, Pat from Twitterfone sent us a couple of invite codes to the private beta. We will pass the codes on to whom ever posts the most insightful comments on any blog posting here at Relevantly Speaking. We will monitor the comments throughout the day, and Scott and I will choose at close of business today (well, since its Friday, we will review it over a happy hour beer or two. Good luck, and we look forward to reading your comments.]

During ad:tech you meet tons of people. From the minute the showroom floor opens it’s a nonstop barrage of hand-shaking, smiling, and convincing people that what you do has tremendous value to their business. After one particular encounter, I started to wonder if, even with a great product, you can blow your own sales opportunity.

It is day two of ad:tech and a gentleman approaches me at our booth under the guise of being a potential client. He asks me what we do at MediaTrust. After my elevator pitch, he latches onto the social media component and says “can you explain to me what social media is?” Thinking that we need to start at entry-level, I go into social media 101. I start to talk about engagement and interaction on sites like facebook and Digg - really high-level stuff. All of a sudden, this social media novice turns into a buzz-word-firing, web 2.0 wunderkind. Within 20 seconds I realize that, not only was he playing possum about social media, he was now trying to pitch me his social media optimization platform. Talk about someone pulling the rug out from under your feet…

Clearly, this guy had been using this tactic all day because it was a finely recited routine. But was it effective? The concept of going to someone’s booth, playing dumb about an industry, then hitting them over the head with your pitch felt like the worst kind of ad:tech-bait-and-switch I had ever seen. Here I am talking to this person in social media baby language, and all of sudden he’s lecturing to me on the post-graduate level. The kicker in all of this is that I actually liked his product, but I won’t do business with him because I didn’t like the ethics of his pitch.

As I stewed about this for a few days I started to wonder how much business is lost because we can’t get out of our own way during the sales cycle.  Here are five rules that can help you close a sale and keep a client:

1. Place the focus on why your product is the best fit, not why others won’t work.

This will help you stay positive and upbeat. Bashing other companies makes you look unprofessional and desperate. 

2. Be genuine in your approach.

Be honest about what you can provide. You may get a client on-board with a slick sales pitch, but if you can’t deliver what you’ve promised, that relationship will be short-lived. Worse, word will spread about your firm’s incompetence.

3. Use personal anecdotes with caution.

Part of closing a deal is building a relationship. With that comes finding common ground through shared stories and experiences. However, I recommend caution when telling those tales. I can’t tell you how many times a salesperson blew it with me because they made some off-color remark during a sales call thinking that we were drinking buddies. Business is business. Be professional.

4. Never underestimate the power of relationship-building.

Lots of sales people are short-sighted. If a client doesn’t bite, the sales staff can’t get you off the phone fast enough. That’s a mistake. Even though it may not be the right time for that particular client to purchase your product or service, they will tell other decision-makers about you if they feel you treated them right. Plus, if you foster a strong relationship that client will seek you out when they are ready to make a deal. 

5. Make them feel valued.

One of the biggest differentiators between successful companies and failing ones, is customer service. After your client has signed that check, do they still feel valued? You’ve earned their business, now keep it by following up regularly. Most of the time the client will tell you that everything is going fine, but they’ll appreciate the fact that you were proactive and cared enough to check-in.

ad:techSF is just around the corner and we will be there again this year after successful events with adtech SF and NYC last year. MediaTrust VP of Social Media, Scott Parent and I will be conducting interviews from the show floor with many of the companies and industry leaders during April 15-17. We also wanted to give you the opportunity to speak with us about your company or your perspective regarding the state of Digital Marketing. We are interested in where you think the  media and advertising industry is heading.  We would love to know what trends interest you in the emerging tech sector and how you think it will impact online marketing. And as SnoopDogg would say, come spit your rhyme about the impact social media is having on your brand.

ad:techSF will be held at The Moscone Center, SF from April 15-17. This years theme is brand strategy and the expanding world of digital marketing. I am looking forward to the keynote with George Klaivkoff, of NBC Universal. He has a pretty cool title, Chief Digital Officer, and oversees digital products across a large variety of media channels.

If you are interested in speaking with us and get your point of view or product featured on this blog, please contact me at csmith at mediatrust dot com. Here is an interview from last years ad:tech with Joseph Giraldi, Director of Marketing for HBO, as he discusses HBO’s podcast strategy with our Chief Marketing Officer Trip Foster.