Month: February 2013

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Affiliate Management Hour – 2013 Small Business Book Award Nominee

Yesterday I was pleased to learn that my last book — “Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day” — has been nominated for a 2013 Small Business Book Award. I’ve learned about it from this Tweet:

I am especially honored to see it being nominated in the Classics category.

At the time of this writing, the book has 65 reviews on Amazon.com, averaging 5 stars.

As I have mentioned in a recent interview to Affiliate Window, “Affiliate Management Hour” is now being translated into Russian and Chinese. Should you be interested in publishing it in other languages, do talk to me. I’d love to also see it in Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, French, and a number of other languages [details here].

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Super Bowl 2013 Power Outage: Best Reactions & Lessons to Learn

When the lights turned off over half of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in the middle of SuperBowl XLVII, I Tweeted:


Honestly, I didn’t expect some of the turns this “talk” has ended up taking, and today (one workweek into the reflections on it, and reactions to it) I’d like to bring a compilation of the five articles I’ve found to be most interesting. Here they are (in chronological order):

1. How Advertisers Made The Super Bowl Power Outage Work For Them by Jennifer Rooney of Forbes.com (02/03/2013, 10:13p)

2. 10 Innovative Social Media Newsjacks of the Super Bowl Power Outage by Anum Hussain of HubSpot (02/04/2013, 11:30p)

3. Marketing Lessons From Super Bowl Power Outage by Daniel Rodriguez of Indivly Magic (02/04/2013)

4. Marketing Lessons and Missed Opportunities From Super Bowl XLVII by Julio Fernandez at HuffingtonPost.com (02/05/2013, 11:51a)

5. Four Things Corporate IT Can Learn from the Super Bowl Power Outage by Jay Livens of Iron Mountain (02/06/2013)

Have you found some interesting follow-ups on the subject? Please share them through the “Comments” area below. I’d love to read them too.

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Facebook Gifts and Principles of Effective Social Commerce Campaigns

On December 11, 2012 Facebook rolled out a new feature. A little too late in my opinion for pre-Christmas shopping, but they have made it possible for “everyone in the U.S.” to receive gifts from friends [original announcement here]. Of course, the friend would have to pay for the gift. That’s the whole point of the exercise. Long gone are the days when we all wondered how (wasn’t the better question “when”?) Facebook is going to monetize their massive membership base.

On the same day TechCrunch‘s Josh Constine ran some numbers and concluded that “Facebook could earn up to $1 billion a year from Gifts” [more here]. His higher-end estimate was based on Facebook earning 20% per purchase. Knowing a bit about what various merchants pay through their affiliate programs, I, actually, think that Facebook’s average cut is closer to 10% here. While they do feature some products from higher-paying niches (e.g. magazine subscriptions, T-shirts, sunglasses, gift baskets) which may yield 20% in “commissions” to Facebook, the majority currently featured merchants do not really pay as much as that. The more common range would be 5%-6% (e.g. Target, iTunes, Cheryl’s) to 7% (e.g. Starbucks) or, maybe, 10% (e.g. Brookstone).

But whether they are going to reap $510 million or $1.02 billion is really irrelevant. The idea itself is great, and represents a perfect example of a well-built social commerce campaign. Here’s a screenshot of how I saw it earlier this morning:

This is one beautifully-crafted social commerce campaign (from which we can all learn something). It is:

(1) Timely — It is Scott’s birthday.

(2) Relevant — He is my friend, and I am a perfect “target audience” for gift buying.

(3) Convenient — I can buy my gift right there and then (out of their selection of gifts) without having to search elsewhere.

(4) It incorporates compelling Social Proof — My others friends, whom I trust, “have used Facebook Gifts” already. What am I waiting for?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go check my own social media or other online marketing initiatives — to see how they compare with what Facebook is doing with Gifts. I’m sure I’ll find plenty of things to tweak.