For this edition of the affiliate team’s blog post I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight the daily responsibilities of the affiliate management service and why, at LBi bigmouthmedia, we strive to make this service as exceptional and proactive as it can be.

I want to initially point out what is expected of me in my role from not only a client’s perspective, but also from my peers. Below I have highlighted some key responsibilities that we have within our affiliate management roles:

So let’s delve a little deeper into what this diagram means to my day.

Proactive Account Management: The most important aspect of my day.

I spend a lot of time incorporating a number of processes to make sure that I am servicing a client and our affiliate partners to the best of my ability. Whether this is through the strong relationships I have spent time building with the contacts I have or taking a strategic look at the week ahead to ensure we are optimising the campaign. Key contributions to this are:

• Ensuring affiliates have the correct promotional information and communicating this in an effective way to them
• Approving affiliates and distributing creative and/or copy to them
• Regular client calls and meetings to discuss the performance of the account
• Regular affiliate calls and meetings to discuss the opportunities with the accounts
• Analysing reports and feeding this data back to the client
• Researching what’s new in the industry
• Identifying exposure opportunities and booking this with affiliates

Expertise and Knowledge:

Attending key industry events is a massive part of my job; if there is something to know about the industry I want to make sure I am there to find out. Attending regular IAB meetings and the annual A4U Expo is a fantastic way to do this. I also spend a lot of time attending networking sessions to meet as many affiliates as I can.

Strategy Focus:

The strategy of a program is the most important part of its success and I spend time everyday analysing the accounts I work on to identify areas of strength and weakness. I also spend time liaising with other teams such as SEO and Social Media to ensure our cross digital approaches are strategically aligned.

With quarterly strategy review meetings and account audits we’re constantly making sure that we know our accounts next move before it even happens. We utilise marketing activity planners, perform frequent analysis and write strategy documents which support our findings and recommendations.

Relationship Building:

An affiliate program would be nothing without the most important players – the affiliates. So to make sure I am looking after this fundamental part of the program I spend a lot of time on affiliate calls, in affiliate meetings and I’m constantly sending emails and on the phone to keep as many people as I can in the loop about what our plans contain for our client programs. In my experience, stronger relationships = stronger performance.

Growth:

Would the online world be a better place if it just stood still? No, it would be a very different, less interesting market to be in and I’m fortunate to be in a job where I am constantly learning. Armed with this new knowledge I can then feed it back into the campaign to increase the power of the brand within its sector. As affiliate managers we are here to maximise the potential of any campaign and combining all of the above is a sure fire way to achieve it.

I hope this provides you just a snapshot of what it is to be an affiliate manager at LBi bigmouthmedia and if this is something that you think you would like to be part of then contact us as we’re delighted to say we have a vacancy to be part of this amazing team.

It’s been busy.

High profile American SEO and blogger Lee Odden compiled a list of 45 SEO and Social Media tools mentioned in just one session. Europen search blog State of Search has put together strong coverage of the ‘Meaningful SEO Metrics’ and Microsoft Advertising’s blog wrote up How to Optimise Your Landing Pages.

The embed below is my second presentation of the conference and looks at how to use Local and Social techniques to maximise visibility across the web. It looks at the difference between local and hyperlocal while showing some examples of social outreach that can be really useful.

The conference was founded in 1999 by Danny Sullivan and is now hosted by Incisive Media after it was bought from JupiterMedia in 2005 for $43 million.

Search Engine Strategies has evolved as Search has evolved. This year’s Search Engine Strategies London contained sessions on local, mobile, retargeting and social media as well as more traditional SEO and PPC.

I was honoured to land two speaking slots at SES London this time round. The presentation below comes from day #2 of the main conference, from the social media track and discusses the importance of having a strategy even if your social media budget is not large. The presentation also includes plenty of suggests for free or low cost tools that can be used carefully.

I love the forward thinking minds of digital. Many live their lives by the motto:

“if you’re not fast you’re last”

It’s a good motto to follow.

I have to confess a bad habbit; whenever I hear of a new television show, product, up-coming event like the Olympics, etc, I immediately go to Fasthosts to check whether the domain name is registered. Nine out of ten times it is. Digital, its cut-throat.

While reading comments about the excessive use of yellow on the BBC Sports Olympics website (not to my cup of tea), it triggered my habbit to check how far into the future Olympic themed usernames on Twitter have been registered.

The answer, 2048. I wasn’t shocked at all.

Twitter have some strict rules on squitters. How well they’re enforced, I don’t know. Not very well in this scenario, at least.

Looking at the squatted profiles, I found it funny how Olympics 2040 and 2044 had a brief conversation with one another:

Olympics 2040 here we comeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

— Abdulrehman (@Olympics2040) September 14, 2010

@Olympics2040 Are you ready?? I know i am.

— Kåre Fyhn (@olympics2044) August 26, 2011

On the same theme, I also decided to check World Cup usernames too. Guess what? Squitters have hit again. One squitter is even trying to sell the World Cup 2014 username.

Hi, this twitter is on sale. If your are interested in, please, send an email to twitter.business+WorldCup2014@gmail.com

— worldcup2014 (@worldcup2014) October 4, 2008

With only a handful of years to come, I think they’re in for a chance. Again though, selling usernames violates Twitter guidelines.

What your thoughts; are squitters worth any money? Have you registered any good usernames? Would you pay for a username? Do you find the term squitter as funny as I do?

Path sells itself (Free on iPhone & Android) as “The smart journal that helps you to share life with the ones you love”. Yes, it’s another app to /share/ your every move – but is it the same? Well for starters, apart from being beautiful to look at and use (even the small clock scrolls as you move up and down the feed), Path has several unique qualities that sets it apart from the likes of Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter:

Only 150 Friends
To some of us this may seem like a lot, but to others it’s a fairly small number. They started out with only allowing 50, but opened it up a bit more a few months ago. Remember “Share life with the ones you love.” Not your ex-girlfriend from School or someone you think you met once at a party, but aren’t really sure – Path lets you be selective. Once you hit 150, you have to start the cull.

Aggregation/multi-posting
Path allows you to post to your other platforms. If there is one thing I love, its aggregation. This  app is almost of the opposite of aggregation – though it aggregates for you what your followers are up to – it allows you to check in – and it checks you into Foursquare; you post a message, you can tweet it as well. Same as for Facebook and Tumblr.

It currently gives you the option of:

• Taking a picture (it provides Instagram style filters – you can buy additional ones for a small cost
• Share a video
• Tag people you are with
• Check in
• Share what song you are listening to
• Post a normal status update

And the feature that many love, and probably didn’t think they would care about: Let’s you say when you go to sleep and then when you wake up. Leaving you with a happy chirpy update about your day and provides you with the current temperature and how many hours you slept.

Who knew how addicting it was to get a glimpse of other peoples sleep patterns!

What is Path missing?
There are still a few bugs here and there, and it can be a bit glitchy when you try to streamline your accounts, but it gets there in the end.

The ability to find contacts is quite lacking. You can only find friends who are on your Facebook or who are already connected to someone else. When trying to add a friend by email, message or SMS – the link sends you to download the app – which you most likely already have at this stage.

An exciting next step will also be the integration of Get Glue – allowing you to share more than what song you are listening to, but what movie or TV show you are watching, book you are reading or activity you are thinking about doing. I find it an almost over obvious pairing – hopefully they’re working on it soon.

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011!

With the introduction of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations on cookie use and user consent a mere two and bit months away, it’s no surprise that approaches to compliance are a hot topic, both in discussions with clients and around the office.  Naturally enough, the principal concern among both parties is the same: what does this mean for my analytics?

Last week, fellow bigmouth Neil Hutson shared his thoughts on “cookie-geddon”, highlighting the possibilities for alternate means of acquiring tracking data and touching on the growing belief that the law, as it currently stands in principle, will be unworkable in practice. Having recently completed both a cookie review and compliance recommendations for one of my clients, I’ve been giving the matter a lot of thought lately and, in particular, I’ve been increasingly interested in looking for comparable scenarios from which we might learn.

Is it enforceable?

As Lamar Smith, the RIAA and others might reluctantly attest, regulating the internet is far from easy. The intrinsic merits of any such efforts aside, attempts to police the incalculable number of websites that might fall under the auspices of a given law are likely to be hamstrung by an inability or unwillingness to commit the resources required to do so effectively. This, incidentally, is probably one of the main reasons why SOPA sought to make a shift from having to prosecute individual instances of copyright infringement and instead undermine the entire mechanism by which copyright can be infringed – in other words willingly throwing the baby out with the bath water:  the existing measures proved to be too much trouble even for an industry with formidable resources and lobbying power. Similarly, it strikes me that the administrative realities of enforcing the cookie law are likely to result in a far more moderate law in practice than in theory.

Stop press: As if by magic, eConsultancy has today published an interview with Foolproof’s Meriel Lenfestey in which she describes the ICO’s task as “almost impossible” and the law itself as “too onerous to be practical”.

But even setting these doubts aside, there are in my opinion reasons why the law should succeed, at least in some senses, and why website owners and SEO practitioners could continue to implement ethical means of collecting and interpreting traffic data.

Making informed choices

In my opinion, it’s quite right that the general public should be encouraged to make informed choices about the information they reveal, who they reveal it to and the uses to which it is ultimately put. As it stands, it’s my impression that most people have at best a vague idea of what cookies are, the data collection methods (ethical and otherwise) employed by websites, and online privacy and safety generally. That’s not a criticism: when you think of the rate at which the internet has developed, it’s no surprise that the degree to which it is understood among the general public lags some way behind the willingness to use it. Whether or not the new law is the best means of bringing about the changes this implies is certainly debatable, but the point remains.

A key problem in all this is that, as a culture, we often have rather inconsistent attitudes to our privacy. For example, 90% of visitors the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website declined consent for cookies, presumably because they valued their privacy, or at least their notion of privacy, more than they valued whatever benefits and functionalities allowing those cookies might confer. Elsewhere, Search Engine Land reported this week on a survey which revealed a whopping 84.5% of respondents that were uncomfortable with Google’s personalised search results, partly because it entails losing a degree of privacy.

Yet on the other hand, nearly half of the UK’s population uses Facebook, willingly handing over far more information than any analytics package could ever collect – name, email address, age, geographic location, image, names of friends and acquaintances, employer, favourite products, films and music – in exchange for functionalities that are available elsewhere for a far lower cost in terms of privacy. So clearly concerns about privacy aren’t so deep rooted as some data would seem to suggest.

1984 and all that

Mobile phone tracking notice at Princesshay shopping centre

Another interesting comparison is the use of mobile phone tracking in many of the UK’s shopping centres. There was a minor outpouring of indignant rage here in Exeter ­– and ultimately, and very briefly, in the national media too – when someone noticed that the city’s Princesshay shopping centre uses a system called FootPath, which relies on tracking mobile-phone signals to monitor the flow of foot traffic through the centre. No personally identifying data is collected and shopping centre owners argue, plausibly enough, that the information is invaluable for planning and management. In other words, very much like website analytics.

In the end, despite local news site This Is Devon hysterically reporting a boycott in protest at this “’big brother’ spying” (though interestingly without attributing this threat to anything more specific than “shoppers”), the story lasted all of a day and it was business as usual at Princesshay. I don’t know how many people now turn their phones off before setting foot in the complex, but I’m going to hazard a guess that few, if any, do.

Is there life after May 2012?

The point in all of this tangential waffle is that there are several very powerful forces at work here, and at the heart of it all is a lack of understanding, along with perhaps an inertial tendency to take the path of least resistance, which leads to contradictory behaviours and attitudes. My conclusion is that if the law is enforced to the letter ­– and remember that’s still a big ‘if’ – then in all likelihood people will either become more educated about online privacy and make more considered decisions about it, trading a degree of privacy for websites better optimised to their desires, or perhaps more likely the issue will lose prominence and things will return more or less to how they currently are.

Whatever the outcome, I believe it is incumbent on us – the Internet industry – to take this as an opportunity to educate the general public on what cookies are and how web analytics data are used. In order to do that, we need to be engaging and upfront about a complex and not always very exciting topic.

The love birds at Spotify have teamed up with the romantics of the Facebook analytics team to give us the top songs that people listen too around the time of updating their relationship status.

Loved up Facebook members who had just entered into a relationship rated Jason Derulo in the top spot with his hit ” Don’t Wanna Go Home”. Facebook members who have made their ‘Single” status Facebook official most commonly listened to “The Cave” by mumford and Sons.

The playlist’s were presented by Jonathan Chang , member of the Facebook Data Team, in an official post’s on the team’s Facebook page.

Songs people listen to when entering into a relationship:

1. “Don’t Wanna Go Home” by Jason Derulo
2. “Love On Top” by Beyoncé
3. “How to Love” by Lil Wayne
4. “Just The Way You Are” by Bruno Mars
5. “Good Feeling” by Flo Rida
6. “It Girl” by Jason Derulo
7. “Stereo Hearts” by Gym Class Heroes featuring Adam Levine
8. “Criminal” by Britney Spears
9. “No Sleep” by Wiz Khalifa
10. “Free Fallin’” by John Mayer

Songs listened by people after ending a relationship:

1. “The Cave” by Mumford and Sons
2. “Crew Love” by Drake
3. “All of the Lights” by Kanye West
4. “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele
5. “Take Care” by Drake
6. “It Will Rain” by Bruno Mars
7. “We Found Love” by Rihanna & Calvin Harris
8. “Call It What You Want” by Foster the People
9. “Love You Like a Love Song” by Selena Gomez and the Scene
10. “Without You” by David Guetta featuring Usher

From the users perspective not much will change. A combined approximate 9% of users in the UK will continue searching either here:

or here:

Search results are expected to have higher relevancy due to the Microsoft search algorithm, which should result in an improved user experience, but could also mean higher click through rates for advertisers.

Based on initial data from Search Alliance results in the US, there is an expectation that Yahoo and Bing combined users will convert more and spend more than users of other engines in the long run. Time will tell – in the meantime it’s worth getting ready for the Alliance, just in case…

So what exactly is going to happen “in the background”?

1. the Yahoo Panama platform will be discontinued, while the Microsoft technology (including the search algorithm) will be used for both interfaces. Advertiser accounts will be “switched off” on Panama and kept live on Adcenter at different dates along March and April.

2. Once the Search Alliance is completed, Yahoo client servicing teams will maintain relationships with advertisers, while Microsoft staff will be available for technical issues, through the Yahoo client servicing team.

3. Microsoft Adcenter advertising accounts will be used going forward – unlike in the US, advertisers won’t have the choice between keeping the Yahoo OR the Bing account live.

Contrary to the US, advertisers in the UK and France won’t need to choose between their Yahoo or Bing account. Bing accounts will automatically be kept live with the Search Alliance and Yahoo accounts will be discontinued.

To avoid significant traffic fluctuations during transition time, it will be of advantage to “match” Yahoo and Bing accounts now, working towards both account and keyword parity. This way, the Microsoft Adcenter account will be ready to go once the Alliance kicks in.

Ultimately the Search Alliance is designed to make it easier for advertisers to be present on both Yahoo and Bing: having to deal with only one tool and technology rather than 2 (and as different as Panama and MSN Adccenter), may well make it worth for more advertisers to invest time and money in Yahoo and Bing. Q2 will bring some results and hopefully interesting news!

In recent weeks we have seen yet another Panda roll out across the globe either have a massive increase or if your one of the unlucky ones, decrease for webmasters throughout the land. On the 25th of January when it was still rumours, online forums had been going into overdrive about it. Only for days later to find out “Yes indeed it was”.

Since then there has been an update on quality signals for webmasters to incorporate into sites that have been hit by the rollout panda and future proofing for the next update.

Panda Watch

Almost a year after the first release of Panda, Google may have let it slip that it is now a rolling update:

“It seems like this means Google has made Panda a bit more integrated into the mainstream algorithm, allowing it to possibly run more frequently and who knows, maybe more real-time?” Click to read more

If Google do gradually merge these mediums together it will mean websites big or small will need to carry out SEO and Tech changes throughout all areas of their site, if not expect to be penalised and left behind!

Given that it has been a year since the first rollout, reports suggest 6 months ago 85% of sites hit by the rollout had not recovered. Carrying out an online poll there has been a mixture of results so far 12 months on:

It is still understandable to see a higher percentage finding it difficult to deal with the continuing resurgence of Panda attacks, but weighing up the good with the bad, sites are taking notice now and realising you can’t come first in search results without putting in some hard graft.

Results of this poll will be in on the 24th of February so keep your eyes peeled on various forums throughout the web for the results.

Given that this figure will be shuffled quite a bit.

Regular Fresh Content

The importance of fresh content on a client’s site and how it can be beneficial is something we like to highlight to all of our clients. So far in February there has been 17 of these updates so far, relating to quality control. Some of the updates include:

Fresher Results: “Several adjustments to the freshness algorithm that we released in November. These are minor updates to make sure we continue to give you the freshest, most relevant results.”

High-quality sites algorithm improvements: “With the Panda algorithm change, targeted at finding more high-quality sites. Panda interacts with Google’s indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines. Google also released a minor update to refresh the data for Panda.”

Improve detection of recurrent event pages: “Several improvements to how Google determine the date of a document. As a result, you’ll see fresher, timelier results, particularly for pages discussing recurring events.”

Source: Blogspot

Why is SEO not good

However, recent events in the world of webmaster news are that Jonathan Rockaway who is a Googler let an odd comment slip on Hacker News:

“Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large. It’s a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug.”

Even though, he did retract his posted statement “buying ads thing and meant buying positions” I just feel like someone has dropped the metaphorical ball on that one!

This got me thinking; surely optimising a website is helping search engines to find good content? That is what we are lead to believe!

Does it not help indexing and if the correct mark-up language is used coincide with Google`s updates?

What are your thoughts on the subject?

Planning on running a digital marketing conference this year? One scheduling tip would be to avoid the 22nd of May.

The diary challenge is one for conference and expo organisers. For bloggers looking to catalogue these events and build a sharable Google calendar of them the bigger challenge was classification. 2012 is a year of digital channel convergence. As our digital marketing specialisms begin to overlap and encroach what are the event organisers supposed to do?

Let’s take Search Marketing as an example. It’s rare to find a Search conference that does not find time for Social Media. After all, as Google’s Search, plus Your World rolls out around the world all SEO strategies need to include tactics for boosting social quality signals. Google incorporates +1 data into PPC ads and so social impacts PPC too. So is there any such thing as a Search Marketing conference anymore? Or are they Search and Social Marketing conferences?

There is also some evidence to suggest that Social gets special treatment. Where are the biddable media elements in many of 2012’s Search conferences? Sure, many hope to cover Google’s Display Network with PPC sessions but what about real-time bidding and ad exchanges? Surely, ad exchanges are to PPC what Social is to SEO?

Then again, perhaps the world of RTB, DSP and ad-exchanges belong in the busy Performance and Affiliate marketing conference schedule?

The calendar below dodges the classification question and is content with date and location. You can add this to your own Google calendar by clicking the button below. Know of an event that should be added? Leave a comment below and we’ll investigate.

Not a Google calendar fan? Here’s the text list?

February

13^th Manchester TEDxManchester
20-24^th London Search Engine Strategies
21^th London IAA Future of Media
24^th London OMI Social Media Summit
28-29^th London OA&A Online Advertising & Affiliate Expo
28-29^th London Technology for Marketing & Advertising

March

1^th London IPA Olympics Restrictions Breakfast Seminar
3^rd Leeds Think Visibility
7-8^th London FT Digital Media Conference
13^th London Performance in Travel
15^th London Digital Cream
20^th Glasgow Think Digital Scotland
21-22^nd London Changing Media Summit
27-28^th London Social Media World Forum
27-29^th London The CMO Show
30^th London LinkLove

April

3^rd London PwC Adpsend Full Year
5^th London Figaro’s Social Media Marketing Conference
13^th Brighton Brighton SEO
17^th London Low-Cost Digital Engagement
18^th London AOP Forum – EY Cookies/Online privacy legislation
24-26^th London Internet World

May

2^nd London Real Time Advertising Conference
10^th London ATi Europe
14^th London International Search Summit
15-16^th London Search Marketing Expo
17-18^th Manchester SASCon
17^th London Marketing Week’s 1-2-1 Social Media Summit
17^th London Mobile Engage
21-22^nd London Social Media in the Utilities Sector
22^nd London Social Media Results
22-23^rd London iStrategy: Transform Your Digital Strategy
22-23^rd London Luxury Interactive London
24^th London Marketing Week’s 1-2-1 Ecommerce Summit

June

25-26^th London OMMA Global
25-27^th London eTail
27-28^th London Marketing Week Live

July

12^th London Figaro’s Social Media Marketing Conference

August

9-10^th Edinburgh Edinburgh Interactive

September

19-20^th London ad:tech

October

13^th London JUMP
15-16^th* London A4U Expo

November

13^th London Funnel
21^st London Figaro’s Social Media Marketing Conference
27-28^th London eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit

* Just guessing

Anything missing?

Events pop up all the time and it is just, maybe, possible that this blogger missed one or two. If you know of an event which could join the others in the collection then leave a comment below and let us know.

Image credit: Tanakawho.