Loren and Michelle Feldman of 1938media.com will be at Affiliate Summit East starting next weekend and are coming out with strong support for Missy Ward’s AffiliateMarketersGiveBack charity:
Despite Loren’s invocation of his pal Shoemoney, it’s great to see them supporting such a worthy cause and I’ll be interested to see his take on the affiliate marketing landscape.
Affiliate Summit Auction To Support Breast Cancer – 1938 Media.
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Google Wave, Chrome, thoughts on Twitter, Bing, competitors, threats and the future of search get covered in this video.
I love Mayer’s comparison of search to 15th century science and its limited capabilities to see the big picture since there is no perfected search microscope or search telescope yet.
If you have 20 minutes to listen while this plays in the background, give it a hear:
Fun stuff. I can’t wait to see what Wave means to the web ecosystem and how Bing continues to morph.
YouTube – **** Interview with Google’s “Cupcake Princess” *****.
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The decline of the once-robust Neandertal branch of our hominoid family tree gives a fitting analogy to the fate of marketers unwilling to invest time and attention to web trends (ie Twitter):
One possibility is that modern humans were less picky about what they ate. Analyses of Neandertal bone chemistry conducted by Hervé Bocherens of the University of Tübingen in Germany suggest that at least some of these hominids specialized in large mammals, such as woolly rhinoceroses, which were relatively rare.
Marean is not alone in thinking that Neandertals were one-trick ponies. A long-standing view holds that moderns outsmarted the Neandertals with not only their superior tool technology and survival tactics but also their gift of gab, which might have helped them form stronger social networks. The Neandertal dullards, in this view, did not stand a chance against the newcomers.
via The Mysterious Downfall of the Neandertals: Scientific American.
We homo sapiens are genetically driven with a sense of communicating and interacting. Twitter and the wide variety of social media tools are just more extensions of that biological impulse to gab, chat and form strong social networks in order to survive.
Play the one-trick pony marketer card all you like, just be aware of the future that awaits your species as you wait out the end in a rocky Gibraltar cave at the edge of the continent.
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It was just two years ago that a Google Slap (what you get when you cross the bridge to the web without Mountain View’s approval), a penalty assessed by Google for mischievous behavior resulting in a lowered PageRank number, was a big deal. A slap was a major sting for sites depending on selling via search since a landing page was a large part of the PPC game in ‘06 and ‘07.
Some things never change… search affiliates still push the limits and Google is still responding with slaps:
Like many affiliates in the past few weeks, I got the Google slap on a few of my top running PPC campaigns which felt like getting my faced kicked repeatedly from Chuck Norris wearing a football cleat. Being a bit upset over losing a big part of my income I had to step back and look at things differently than I have lately.
However, does the Google Slap really hurt that much anymore? Sure, it hurts your hard fought (or not) PageRank, but the PPC and search advertising business has morphed in such a way that landing pages aren’t what they used to be (and arbitrage has dwindled in popularity to much more efficient methods of return).
It seems to me that Google has reached a tenuous point with search publishers and is in a tricky situation regarding punishments and banishments for TOS violations. They can’t appear to be too draconian and risk tipping the paid search apple cart, but they can’t continue the detante that has been reached with the envelope-pushing crowd.
To be clear, I think most publishers who get slapped deserve what they get. The rules are pretty clear. Sure, you can say it’s unfair, but it’s Google’s web at the moment. And if you’re going to dance, you gotta pay the band.
As Google continues to offer new products, creep into the OS space, find a solid footing in the enterprise suite world and inculcate a whole generation of students with Google Apps, and face (temporary) pressure from Bing! it will be interesting to track just how Google deals with search affiliates and publishers that will inevitably continue to test the boundaries.
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AffiliateHack is published by Sam Harrelson and covers the convergence of the social web with the world of affiliate marketing.
