The pickled egg

Fans Grow on Farms - David Berkowitz assesses Bings fan harvest

via www.marketersstudio.com

In One day Bing adds 300,000 fans on Facebook. Resounding success or questionable buying of an unengaged audience? David Berkowitz weighs up the arguments for and against harvesting fans.

YouTube - THE NEW DORK - Entrepreneur State of Mind (Jay-Z ft Alicia Keys Spoof) | Grasshopper.com

via www.youtube.com

I need me a New Dork! Social media hipsters in San Francisco. Yes. We ARE that cool. Too funny.

Developing a social strategy

Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang have released their second deck in a series of three, Developing a social strategy (for those of you that missed the first, see Understand customers’ social behaviours). It’s right on the money, and refreshingly looks at things from a business rather than a marketing perspective. As they say, “social technologies will disrupt traditional organisational structures”. Enjoy:

via wearesocial.net

Awesome social media marketing presentation from coca cola

Coke's 'fans first' approach in social communities

View more presentations from iStrategy.

These guys make a great case for integrating social communities and reaching out to customers where they are in a way which requires them to truly engage. It makes an important point about SMM being an ongoing tactic not a campaign based short cycle effort which is then abandoned with the next new project. It requires commitment and universal application.

Making Reblog Better - meta head spin

Last November we released a new feature called Reblog, which makes it easy for your readers to share your content others in their network.  When someone reblogs your content part, or all, of your post appears on the reblogger’s blog with attribution link back to your original post so you get the credit you deserve.

via beta.typepad.com

reblogging about reblogging - super meta wow out there ridiculousness

Help Haiti Widget - International Medical Corps

I am pleased to see International Medical Corps using widgets/badges to encourage others to help them with their marketing and awareness efforts around the Haiti earthquake effort.

I wonder if there is an easy way to resize it in my side bar?  - for now it will just have to be a post.

Let’s Kill The CPM

All campaigns start with the best of intentions: “let’s do something creative, engaging, and unique!” But unless someone really senior from the agency or client side intervenes, the road for a campaign always leads to the media buyer and the dreaded spreadsheet, where the two most important columns are impressions and cost. Ironically, there’s usually some good stuff in campaigns, but they are thrown in for free as “value adds.” At some point, publishers decide that if all clients care about is impressions, then OK, we’ll give them impressions. The output is an industry that overproduces shallow, superficial, commoditized impressions. Why do we have so many bad sites that republish the same junky content–content that’s often made by machines or $1-per-post contractors? Why do sites intentionally try to get us to turn lots of pages with tons of top 10 lists, photo galleries, or single-paragraph summaries of someone else’s story?

via www.techcrunch.com

Whiskey Media CEO, Shelby Bonnie, discusses how the CPM model has suffocated innovation in recent years. Interesting elements of online campaigns are added in as "value adds". That's certainly our experience at Six Apart. There is no column in the spreadsheet for engagement, conversation, seeding, viral reach, evangelism, instead those are built into a higher CPM. Bizarre that these great ideas must dress themselves as something outdated to get through the net. Innovation disguised as same old, same old...

The fascinating thing is that simultaneously VideoEgg has just revealed they doubled revenue in 2009 to $25 million pushing them into profitability. Their key metric is cost per engagement and their ads receive an average 1% CTR. Could this year be the year the CPM model finally bites the dust? Let's hope so.

19% of tweets mention brands

19% of tweets mention brands / we are social

Prof. Jansen's 2008 study on the Twittersphere. nearly 1 in 5 tweets involve a brand and 1 in 5 also involve an emotive point of view. Thanks to Violette Verite @ we are social for the post

Social media ROI: Socialnomics

via www.colombiz.com

A wonderfully powerful and totally one sided view on social media ROI

Affiliate Marketing on TypePad

The exciting under world of affiliates! I have a new found respect for these guys. I feel like I am engaging them in battle, challenging them to a duel, armed with only my wonky, and at times erratic, data report and my wits. It's kinda thrilling being part of this chess game.

While trying to ramp up our activity via Commission Junction I have been outwitted by these people a few times I have to admit. Changing payment structures to increase revenue per sale and lower risk, only to uncover a loop hole we had not been aware of, is frustrating. 

To date TypePad has taken a passive approach to affiliates - if you were feeling strong enough to get through the sign up process then you could earn a flat $30 per sale - even if you were selling a basic account for just $4.95 a month. In a way this sign up ordeal proved to be a good filter - you had to REALLY want it to join and as a result the gamers weren't that interested.

Then I took it on, cleaned it up, opened it to all CJ partners and now things are starting to happen  - some good, some less so. Either way we are still seeing a positive ROI from what our reporting can tell me.

So if you are interested in this roller coaster ride of affiliate marketing for subscription services (with a free 2 week trial  - that's the twist!)  - here is the process so far.

Review

Review sign up process and experience. Our Six Apart program was confused with multiple products and brands including Movable Type. We stripped it down and made it clear this was the TypePad Program. Payment process was also murky. We gave it a little love, uncovered the sticking points and streamlined it.

Help

We brought in the troops! We had a huge back log of applications into the program. We brought in an agency LeadQual, SEM and affiliate experts, to help us clear the back log and put process in place

Data

We reviewed the data and realized it was woefully inadequate to play in this space. We needed average revenue per sale based on the expected life time value of a customer brought in through this channel. This would be our key metric.

We also discovered that our top referrers had a great deal in common. Most were TypePad customers, they skewed mainly female, and business consultants and crafters were well represented.

Building engagement

Weekly newsletter have started to awaken dormant partners, including best practice tips and tricks for inspiration. We identified the top performers based on ROI as well as sales. We'll treat this group like VIPs - which reminds me a Christmas card from TypePad might be a good idea.

Targets defined

We want to increase revenue per sale and lower the risk. That means looking at how we can structure the payment model to better suit both us and our partners.

If you are interested in getting involved - you'll find the details here - please excuse the sign up process - we are still working on it! I promise it will be worthwhile!