We may argue about the effectiveness of social media presence/campaigns for business promotion and sales generation, but one thing that no one seems to doubt is that it is one of the hottest topics in present-day marketing. Whether fueled by a global hype or not, but Google Instant keeps popping suggestions on social media marketing even when I’m not looking for things related to it at all… Google prides itself with its prediction technology which helps it “predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing” [more here]. Well, here’s what I get:

1. When we type in “social”, “social network” is among the top 5 suggestions:

2. Type in “why marketer” and you get:

3. When you start with “how do marketer” Google Instant suggests:

4. If you type in “can you market”, the social medial outlets are even more prevalent:

5. And, finally, should you wonder about “effective marketing”, the suggestions go as follows:

Wow… You can believe in social media marketing or not, but clearly there’s no way to ignore it…

It is interesting to see where Gartner places social media developments in its annual “Hype Cycle” report of emerging technologies:

According to the above curve, out of social media technologies:

• Social analytics is on the rise. Gartner says “the value resides in applying” predictive analytics techniques “in new applications such as social analytics and sentiment analysis”.
• Microblogging (which predominantly happens on Twitter) is 2 to 5 years, and it’s on the bottom of the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”.
• Corporate blogging, social software suites, and wikis which were scored in the previous Hype Cycle report are no longer there, but should be in Gartner’s “Slope of Enlightenment” now.

I’m split on the subject of social media marketing effectiveness (I could certainly use more analytics data). I do understand how when properly handled social media efforts increase engagement with brands (personal or corporate) and facilitate loyalty growing “fans”; but I, personally, do not know of one marketer who could confidently compare the sales effect of social media efforts to, say, search engine-based paid search, SEO, or affiliate programs. But then again: shouldn’t we distinguish between the types of social media efforts? Blogging isn’t the same as microblogging (aka “tweeting”), and even within Facebook — a PPC campaign is very different from interaction with consumers via a “fan” page.

What do you think? What has been your experience? Does social media marketing work for you? The comments are all yours.

Using Google Suggest (aka autocomplete) to spot some of the most popular affiliate marketing-related questions, we see 5 questions score particularly high. I’ve answered them all in my previous blog posts and articles, and today I’ve decided to put them together into an easy-to-use compilation.

1. What is affiliate marketing?

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing, whereby affiliates promote a merchant’s product/service and get remunerated for every sale, visit, or subscription sent to the merchant.

2. Who are affiliates?

Not to be confused with any of the traditional business or legal definitions, “affiliate” (especially when used in conjunction with “marketer”) is an independent marketer who may choose to promote a business, and be paid on performance-based basis. Read this post for further details.

3. How to define super affiliate?

I like to define super affiliates in terms of the following three characteristics: (1) maturity, (2) potential, and (3) income. More in the “Super Affiliate — My Definition” post of mine.

4. What is the best affiliate program?

For a full answer to this one see both my answer to the “What is the Best Affiliate Program?” question, and my “Most Profitable Affiliate Marketing Niches” post.

5. Why affiliate marketers fail?

This is an extremely important question. I believe that there are 5 main reasons why people fail at affiliate marketing: (1) lack of education, (2) laziness, (3) lack of persistence, (4) failing to diversify, (5) not testing.

I hope my answers will help both newer and seasoned affiliate marketers. As always, your comments are heartily welcomed.

I’ve spotted this story yesterday morning in a Russian online newspaper, but couldn’t find it anywhere on the English-speaking web then. Had to wait until later in the day to see it published by AFP, and picked up by a number of other news channels including Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN, and others.

The essence of the situation was such that a French “man convicted of a three year suspended jail sentence for corruption of a minor claimed that when one Googled his name, the terms ‘rapist’ and ‘satanist’ came up in Google’s Suggest feature” [source] and sued Google over it, stating that he has already paid in full for his crimes, and shouldn’t have this happening to him after he has already served prison time.

Google, in its turn, stated that the Google Suggest function merely “reflected the most common terms used in the past with words entered, so it was not Google itself that was making the suggestions” [source] and said they plan to appeal the French “court decision ordering the company to pay 5,000 euros ($6,750) in damages to a convicted sex offender” [source].

Very interesting situation; and I truly have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, a convicted criminal  suing a search engine over a mechanism that simply refers to the resonance the former has created in the society, sounds close to insane. How could you “defame” this person any more than they have already defamed themselves? That oxymoron #1.

On the other hand, however, you may remember my last Saturday’s post where upon playing with a tool called Web Seer, I concluded that some of the results were “interesting, others — logical, and some — rather surprising”. What exactly did I mean by the latter? Well, look at the 3rd “suggestion” for ShareASale below:

“Scam”? Per Webster’s dictionary, that word stands for “a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation” [source]. Per my yesterday’s list of abbreviations, all these reviews, and my personal 6-years-long experience with this affiliate network it is it is one of the most ethical affiliate networks around (“known for its stance against parasites, its strive for transparency, and strong affiliate support”). How in the world do they have “scam” as a keyword in the third most popular word combination involving ShareASale? We know the answer from Google’s words quoted above (the function reflects “the most common terms used in the past with words entered”). To say the least, this is surprising. To say it as it is: if there is something that must be removed from the suggestions it is this word combination. It itself is oxymoron #2 (of the day).

Earlier this week, while listening to David Szetela’s and Brad Geddes’ How Adwords will be Affected by Google Instant podcast I’ve learned about a cool tool which lets you compare Google Suggest results — Web Seer. As we know, it is precisely Google Suggest (with its autocomplete function) that is at the core of Google Instant‘s idea. So, it was good to learn about this tool from Brad’s talk with David.

Today I’ve played a bit with it, and here are just a few of the interesting visualizations (of what people search for) I’ve been able to retrieve:

Affiliate M…

Affiliate Marketing vs Affiliate Management

Affiliate Program vs Affiliate Network

Commission Junction vs LinkShare

Google Affiliate Network vs ShareASale

Some of the above results are interesting, others — logical, and some — rather surprising. But I’ve refrained from highlighting any, and will let you make your own conclusions. Either way, this is a very good tool to have access to.

If you’re in affiliate marketing, you’re more than likely already aware of the fact that Tim Storm, the founding CEO of FatWallet has been named finalist for Entrepreneur of 2010 awards by Entrepreneur Magazine. That’s a huge achievement for an affiliate marketer, and congratulations are certainly in order.

There is another achievement of FatWallet that I’ve suddenly discovered the day before yesterday (while searching for a GoDaddy coupon looking to renew registration of a domain name I own) that I’d like to share with you today.

As always, I went to Google, typed in a [merchant name]+[coupon] key phrase, and guess what I saw? The Google Suggest‘s dropdown showed me:

Wow! Now that is an achievement! Without even seeing the top 10 search results, I already saw an affiliate site. When I clicked the link (remember, it was 07/31) I saw a thread on FatWallet’s forum where multiple suggestions for GoDaddy coupons were listed, and FatWallet-exclusive ones topped the list (all naturally hyperlinked to set the affiliate cookie):

Next day (08/01) I decided to email FatWallet about two merchants whose programs I’d love for them to partner with. I am currently in Russia (Moscow time zone). So my late morning was their late night (FatWallet is headquartered in Illinois, hence the Central Time zone, hence 9 hours behind me now). It was also Sunday. Nevertheless, their response followed 2 minutes after the submission of question (or at at 2:32 am CST):

I guess, a business like this truly deserves to be highlighted.

…at least to a degree (and this is good to see).

Back in May of this year when Google Suggest got links to the main/official websites added to the lists of suggested search phrases, I am pretty positive they did not have affiliate marketing in mind. The feature was certainly mainly geared towards to the end users, but it appears to help merchants prevent affiliates (as well as competitors) from poaching their trademarks through Google AdWords.

For example, if before May 2009 we searched Google for “Cabelas”, we’d get the following suggested key(words)/(phrases) shown to us:

Now the suggestions look as follows:

From the above image, it is obvious that Google Suggest puts the original website on the very top position, and all paid search ads (which are bidding on the keyword in the search field) on the bottom of the list. Ideally, for the purposes of preventing trademark poaching on this level, paid ads should have been excluded altogether. But since, as stated at the outset, trademark poaching was unlikely the primary concern of Google, it’s good to see that PPC ads are at least pushed down to the very bottom.