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.

This week we did something different, and somewhat indulgent - we turned spotlight on ourselves and shared the how’s and why’s that go into creating the Relevantly Speaking podcast. How was it conceived? What type of equipment do we we use to shoot the segments? What is the distribution philosophy? What are we working on next?

Christopher and I talked about all of that during a sunny afternoon in my backyard in Santa Barbara. If you’re really paying attention, you can catch a glimpse of my dog, Mia, hanging around the “set.” You may also hear lawnmowers, birds, and other sounds of the day. We felt these added to the unique flavor of the behind the scenes chat.

If you’d like to share your thoughts on how you produce your podcast, we’d love to have you join the conversation in the comments section.

Check out Relevantly Speaking in Hi-Definition Video

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.

This is the second part of our conversation with David Taber. In this segment David talks about how affiliate networks can make themselves more attractive to advertisers and what you should look for when researching a network to do business with.

Check out Relevantly Speaking in Hi-Definition Video

Great news from the front line of the New York State Affiliate Tax (also known as the Amazon Tax) front. After dropping their New York affiliates Overstock has turned around and joined Amazon in fighting the affiliate tax. The news was fist broken this weekend by Linda at 5 Star Affiliate Programs who along with Heather Paulson and Shawn Collins has been following the events closely and getting key information out into the affiliate community. I have to say I am impressed at how our community has collaborated through the use of social media to create a voice and ground swell against the tax issue.

I was fortunate to be speaking to our business partner Adrian from Meet Innovators who had been reading our posts and he told me he was going to interview Patric Byrne the CEO of Overstock. Adrian asked what questions would I like to have asked about the current issues. The interview just came out today and not only shows Overstock’s position that this tax is ridiculous, but also talks about how valuable (and large) Overstock’s affiliate marketing program is and that it is a very important part of their marketing initiatives. Here are a few segments from the interview:

Patrick: About 15 years ago, the Supreme Court found that you cannot hold a catalog company responsible for collecting out-of-state sales tax. There are 7,200 taxing jurisdictions in the United States. In some jurisdictions, cotton candy is candy. In some, cotton candy is food, and food and candy have different tax rates. A company in Utah, for example, cannot sit here and know the right way to tax every possible product in Paducah, Kentucky. It is impossible.

The Supreme Court wisely said that the burden cannot be put on the out-of-state retailer. Therefore, I think New York’s law is directly unconstitutional. We’re not suing the state for any money. We’re suing to enjoin them from ever acting upon this law, and we’re trying to get the Court to throw out the law.

We had to drop the affiliates because of the risk of not collecting the affiliate tax and then someday having New York win. We would get dinged for that. So we had to drop the affiliates immediately.

The decision to seek an injunction is the right long-term thing to do. We have a law firm in New York, and we’re putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into this.…….

Adrian: Do you have a large affiliate program or is most of your revenue from Super Bowl ads and type-in traffic?

Patrick: Affiliates are very nice double-digit percentage of our business. The outside sees our growth of $200 to $800 million, and it may look like it was all smooth. It really was four to five different things we found that worked. One of the big ones is the affiliate business.

We were doing less than $1 million a year in affiliate business when we discovered this was a great opportunity for us. The affiliate business is still a very healthy chunk of our business, larger than $100 million.

Last year, Amazon dealt a real blow to their affiliate program by basically saying they were going to stop paying affiliates or only pay a drastically reduced fee on a wide range of products. Our affiliates bring us value, and we have supported them. We’ve regularly won prizes such as “Merchant of the Year” and “Program of the Year” from Link Share. That is a testament that we, as a company, take our affiliate team very seriously….

The tail end of the interview speaks about how the affiliate community can get involved and help Overstock and Amazon fight the Tax. Please take the time to do something regardless of whether you are directly involved with this tax. This looks like it could spread to other states if this is not stopped dead in it’s tracks. Make your voice heard! Thank you Patrick Byrne for stepping up to the plate. Special Thanks to Adrian for getting this interview and information for us. We hope to have more news from the IAB public policy front lines.

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

We talk a lot on Relevantly Speaking about how companies are using social media in nearly every form. For the purposes of this post, let’s talk about video content. Let’s say we’ve convinced you to give it a try and you’re ready to start a video series for your company. You have a camera and you’ve shot some footage, but how do you add polish to the finished product? One tool that we use here at MediaTrust is a company called iStockphoto. They have thousands of high-quality images and HD videos that you can purchase and use in your productions. Businesses are using them in their presentations, bands are using them to make low-budget videos, and filmmakers are using them to supplement the footage they can’t get on their own.

For this episode we pull out some footage from the vault. This was shot in March when Christopher and I were covering SXSW. I think you’ll find it helpful.

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.

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