Social media remains an elusive, yet incredibly tempting proposition for brands and retailers alike. Tapping into a captive audience of millions, who will recommend products and services to their friends, which will in turn generate consistent, incremental sales is becoming something of an obsession for many companies. With General Motors pulling its annual $10 million advertising spend from Facebook just days before the much anticipated IPO, questions are beginning to circulate again as to how effective these campaigns are.
Enter the snake oil salesmen… ok, that might be slightly dramatic and disingenuous, but it seems that countless of brand new companies are offering the ultimate remedy for monetizing ‘fans’ and ‘likes’ which uses an attractive, relatively affordable, affiliate CPA model.
Several companies operate in the same way – You sign up with the company, who will create an account for you. If you want to share a link with your friends, you run it through the company’s website first, which will turn it into an affiliate link. If one of your friends buys through this new link, then the company will give you a cut of the commission. You can then take it out of your account after you reach a certain threshold. “Money for nothing” as Dire Straits once said.
In the UK we have ‘Have you Seen’ and Digital Animal’s ‘Fandistribution’. The US has ‘Referly’ and there are countless also others worldwide competing in the same space which operate similar models.
Unfortunately, it just sounds too much like a sub network for my liking. Even if you have no idea about affiliate marketing, you can infer from just reading the name that “sub network” is not a good thing. Sub literally means under, below or beneath. It should come as no surprise that suspect and fraudulent activity has long been associated with this model and that the general feeling among affiliate managers is that it’s just not worth the hassle.
The downsides of sub networks are pretty obvious.
- No relationship with the sub affiliates – Relationship building is a key part of the industry, which is why I make sure to attend every networking event diligently (Disclaimer: There’s usually free food and booze also). Making the most of your ‘virtual sales force’ is a lot more difficult when you don’t even know who they are.
- Complying with the programme terms – This is a huge issue for me. With a sub network, you lose almost all control that you would normally retain over brand and how it is presented. Fussy about the spelling of your brand name? Good luck with that…
- Suspect activity – Unfortunately, sub networks attract everyone who’s been kicked of the major networks for bad behaviour. Do you really want the heart breaking task of ensuring they’re all compliant, when you don’t even know who’s doing what? That’s a lot of trust to place in a network, even if they have all the best intentions.
I’m a huge fan of innovation and new technology in the affiliate space. It keeps everything interesting and evolving. Unfortunately, I don’t wish to give free reign to anyone with a Facebook account to go promote my brands. As usual though, I’m prepared to give these companies a chance to prove themselves. Maybe they’ve figured out how to overcome all of my misgivings? There’s only one way to find out…
Twitter recently announced the advancement of usernames, hashtags, visual content and other rich media being cross-posted to Facebook which came into practise at the end of May spokesman Week’s stated earlier last week “We have fixed many issues with the Twitter for Facebook integration, including the ability to post to Facebook Pages, and added some new features!”
To view these alterations users must first disconnect then re-connect their Twitter and Facebook accounts within their Twitter profile settings.
According to a recent study by The Los Angeles Times. Growing evidence indicates teens are logging onto their Facebook accounts far less, which could be attributed to several factors including parents monitoring their children’s use of the site. On competitor social networking platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr, underage teens can pass under any alias, often corresponding with strangers behaving much in the same way as the previous youth generation with MySpace which also stirs up the all too familiar debate of privacy laws.
Networks of friends also find themselves enjoying the functions of Twitter including the increasing trend for creating hashtags, results from a recent Pew Internet survey, shows 31% of all internet users between the ages of 18 to 24 use Twitter, though it is likely several have inactive accounts.
Facebook currently has an approximated 900 million users Facebook and therefore has little cause of worry in terms of its popularity. However if teens really are beginning to lose enthusiasm for it, the company has to find ways to keep engaging this demographic in order to avoid going down the same route as the once hugely popular myspace.
Take the Internet Meme around “Casually Pepper Spray Everything” following a US policeman who was photographed nonchalantly spraying student protesters earlier in the year. The striking image was promptly photo-shopped to oblivion as the meme gained popularity on aggregator sites before being shared via email, social networks, forums and eventually making it into mainstream news shows. This sort of collaborative media activity has become a pervasive part of the Web 2.0 era and is redefining how old media companies interact with their audiences, changing what content gets shared, what becomes popular and what sort of media we all consume.
The social network currently has 160 million users and differs from Facebook and Twitter (both of whom focus on friends and interests) in that it facilitates professional connections. The passwords reveal that many clearly see logging into LinkedIn as a work-related, professional necessity, rather than a way of socialising online.
LinkedIn confirmed that their site had been hacked and the passwords were genuine stating: ‘We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts.’
Online security experts and LinkedIn highly recommend you change your password for the network.
LinkedIn has more than 160million users in 200 countries and nine million in the UK.
Part of Google+’s recent changes we discussed last week, Google+ Business Pages have integrated Google Places. The change has meant that many pages that were Google Places (integrated with Google’s natural search) have been changed to Google+ Business pages. The 80 million Google Place pages worldwide have been automatically converted into 80 million Google+ Local pages, according to Google’s Marissa Mayer. It’s a dramatic change, though it will undoubtedly disorient some users and business owners.
Google have provided a quick breakdown of what has changed below:
- The substitution of the new Google+ Local pages (as mentioned) for Google Places pages
- The appearance of a “Local” tab within Google+
- The integration and free availability of Zagat reviews (its entire archive across categories)
- The integration of Google+ Local pages across Google properties (search, Maps, mobile)
- Integration of a circles filter to find reviews/recommendations from friends/family/colleagues
Find out more at Google Places: http://www.google.com/places/
In the past, Facebook has admitted it is struggling cash in the growing number of people who log in to Facebook using their smartphones. In the last few days, Facebook has recently launched a mobile app store called The App Center and offers links to many of the Facebook-enabled apps within Apple’s iOS and Google Android stores. According to the New York Times sources, Facebook has hired several former Apple employees who have worked on the iPhone and other smartphones. On of the quotes from a Facebook employee claims that the site’s founder Mark Zuckerberg was apparently “worried that if he doesn’t create a mobile phone in the near future, Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms”.
In the light of Facebook’s IPO debacle, generating money from mobile must be one of the post pressing issues on the table in Palo Alto at the moment.
To talk about social media, please get in touch: ben.romberg@tugsearch.co.uk
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According to their blog, the updates will make the social network: ” easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly, it accelerates efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google.”
One of the first things you’ll notice about the new layout is a new way to get around the stream. Instead of static icons at the top, there’s a dynamic ribbon of applications on the left.
The news feed will detail larger photos, conversation “cards” that make it easier to scan and join discussions and a newsfeed “drawer” that looks similar to Facebook’s side bar that provides a rolling feed of updates.
The Google+ update extends beyond navigation, the stream and hangouts. For instance: there’s a new Explore page that shows what’s interesting and trending across the network. And a new profile with much bigger photos. And a new chat list that puts your friends front and centre.
In a word, the update has made the network a lot more social.
Talk to Tug about social media, email: ben.romberg@tugsearch.co.uk
Follow us on Twitter: @tugagency
Microsoft has announced the launch of So.cl, its search integrated social network was designed initially for students but is now available for public use. The website has been available to students since the beginning of this year in beta and only available to a selection of institutions that agreed to partner with Microsoft. This current version with Facebook connect has been redeveloped for public use.
So.cl initially was built by the FUSE Labs of Microsoft Research stated to become an “experimental research project” that married the twin disciplines of Social and Search. Now publicly available, it is possible to log into So.cl using a Windows Live ID or a Facebook account, giving access to a social search engine where all public inquiries appear in a real time feed.
According to So.cl’s FAQ section, the aim of the social search network is to “help people find and share interesting web pages in the way students do when they work together.”
So.cl features videos and rich content that marries users searching for content together in a social way that allows for a discussion about the content in real time. The networks functionality does this by encouraging users to generate “rich posts,” which are pooled or collated collections of rich content and links on a given topic that can generated or developed by any signed up user and shared via their connected networks. The launch of So.cl comes hot on the heels of the introduction of Bing’s social column that provides relevant social media conversations in the search engine’s results page. Microsoft is clearly putting its stake in the future of Social Search.
Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten today announced it will invest upwards of $50 million in the next funding round for social bookmarking phenomenon Pinterest. The round should raise $100 million in total, with the remainder likely to come from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, along with several prominent Angel Investors.
Rakuten are one of the world’s largest internet service companies, currently operating in 17 markets and ranked amongst the top 10 with Google, Amazon, eBay etc. Among its many properties is Rakuten Ichiba, the largest e-commerce site in Japan, Play.com in the UK, Buy.com in the US and similar sites in Germany and Brazil.
Pinterest are hoping that by partnering with such an aggressive ecommerce powerhouse, they can finally monetise the site in a meaningful way, while fending off the countless imitation sites that have popped up all over the globe.
One of the more interesting sides to this deal which hasn’t been mentioned anywhere, is that Rakuten also own Linkshare, one of the world’s major affiliate networks. Affiliate links were an essential aspect to the site in its early days. Pinterest used a company called Skimlinks to modify users’ links to commerce sites. Any sales through these links returned commission to Pinterest, but it has never performed efficiently enough. A lot of content is shared from other sources such as Facebook and Tumblr, or the links are not commercial products to begin with, which limits the scope for development and growth.
I’ll be keeping a close eye on this and can’t wait to see what solutions they come up with to generate more revenue for the company. If it somehow involves an ingenious affiliate solution, all the better!
