Earlier this week I hung out with the guys behind the service called Fast Society – a simple, private group chat tool. I  had met them in the MediaTrust offices in New York back in August, but they were in Austin to soft-launch Fast Society at SXSW.

According to Andy Thompson, Matthew Rosenberg and Michael Constantiner (above), Fast Society was built out of the frustration that came with trying to plan and communicate with their friends on nights out.

Michael says “when we conceptualized the product, we had a few key features that we felt were really important that we didn’t see from other players in the market. First and most importantly is that it should really focus around SMS. 98% of cell phones have SMS capabilities and it is quickly becoming the standard means of communication for the socially active audience we’re targeting. Teens and 20 year olds don’t email with their friends, they text each other. So keeping that natural medium of communication was essential.”

They also said they felt strongly about the idea that the groups should be short-term and focus on a specific event. It keeps Fast Society fresh in users’ minds and the experience becomes better. When users go back to look at conversation history on the event page, they’ll recapture memories from that event.

Another really cool feature about this product is the on-the-go conference calling. By sending the word “CALL” to the short code, Fast Society sends a dial-in number to the team and everyone can hop on and have a quick call from wherever they are. The call is then recorded and placed in the stream on the event page.

The usefulness of a service like this is endless, especially in the business realm. How many times have you touched down with your sales or marketing team at an event and needed a way to stay in close contact? What usually happens is haphazard meetings, and random one-off calls to keep the team appraised of what’s going on and any new developments around meetings or events. Fast Society is certainly great for social gatherings (as it was intended), but it is absolutely BRILLIANT as an organization and communication tool for business teams traveling together at conferences.

As the icing on the cake, it’s completely free to users, although standard carrier messaging rates apply.

Where Have All the Seniors Gone?

Facebook! According to research firm Nielsen nearly half of all online seniors visited Facebook or Youtube last month. Facebook has become the third most visited site on the net by seniors, of which there are 17.5 million active US seniors online. For more stats check out this article on Mashable.

While it is great to see this demographic growing online, it doesn’t necessarily mean opportunity does it? Well according to the seniors themselves, it does. When reading the above article, I happened to take a look at the comments posted after the article and a few of them caught my attention. The first being Deanna Carlisle who stated:

“I’m a senior….don’t play Farmville….don’t have time… still working and have 15 grandkids, I use Facebook to stay in touch with family. I also don’t like to shop so I order. My husband keeps up with local high school sports on webcasts. I’m not surprised that so many seniors are using the internet it has almost replaced television for us.”

And right underneath Deanna’s comments were ralphcarlson:

“I’m a senior (actually hate that term) that’s not even a boomer. I’m busy building a web profile with the intent of increasing my income. Web shopping is much better than actually going to the stores.”

What an opportunity for affiliate marketers. The growth of social media has been a boom for our industry, creating an additional and highly targetable distribution and income avenue for affiliates.

The senior market has long been ignored by many in our industry but with the stats put out by Nielsen and with seniors themselves stating they prefer to purchase online instead of going to a store, it creates an enormous opportunity for those of us in the performance marketing world to look to cater to this growing demographic.

We’ve seen success targeting senior related campaigns on Facebook since targeting by demographics is relatively easy to do on Facebook. I would also venture to guess not many publishers see dollar signs when they think of targeting seniors as part of their overall affiliate marketing strategy. I would suggest you reconsider and find campaigns that would work well with the seniors market. It is not as competitive, the cost would be relatively low compared to the coveted 18-45 demographic that most advertisers and publishers target and the place to find them is easy. Like the rest of us, you can find them on Facebook.

Checking in from SXSW yet again – Unfortunately I’m still reporting from the hotel room as it’s been difficult to find a quiet spot on the tradeshow floor to shoot. That said, we’re starting to see some themes this year in Austin.

First, I’ve talked to a lot of people that are discusing interesting ways to use geolocation and couponing around food, music and entertainment. Companies really seem to finally be interested in creating localized and immediate marketing campaigns around a specific location or event.

Second, I continue to have conversations with companies that are finding better ways to measure true customer engagement and vet the marketing channels that are having true impact. In fact, last night after I posted “Digging Deeper on Metrics,” I had three separate conversations with execs at different companies that talked about how they finally feel like they can really invest some money in social media campaigns, either for themselves or their clients, because the measurement tools are now catching up.

Finally, I spoke to Jeff Reine at Popbox about how brands could use this device to create an enhanced version of the traditional television commercial. If you haven’t heard of Popbox, it’s a set-top box (with an April release) that aggregates all your media in a way that’s viewable on your TV. Think of the simplicity of AppleTV, but with the ability to stream Netflix movies, Revision3 shows, Twitter, Flickr photos etc. There is also a dedicated chunk of screen real estate in the interface that is begging for content creators to really build a more interactive campaign around promoting the launch of a new show, a hot young band, or the latest Coca-Cola product. Look for that full interview with Jeff in the coming weeks.

Today on the tradeshow floor at SXSW, I met with several companies that were doing some interesting things with metrics and analyzing engagement. As marketers we can’t just focus our attention on hits and conversions. We need to be able to gather intelligence about the specific channels and tactics that work in a given campaign, and which ones don’t.

I met with a company called Lytiks out of Boston. They’ve built a system with a simple dashboard that tracks actions, engagement, time spent on site etc. Now, in some ways it’s similar to Google Analytics. But where Lytiks really shines is the integration of call tracking into their system. The example David Jenkens, CEO of Lytiks, gave to me was that of a local plumber. Let’s say a plumber places the same phone number in yellowpages.com, their local paper and sets up a campaign using Google AdWords. How do I know which marketing channel is performing the best? What is the best ROI? In Lytiks you can create a separate phone number from inide the platform. Choose an 800 number or a local area code and place each unique number in it’s own channel. Then at the end of each month you can clearly see which channel has worked the best.

There’s also a slew of other ways to track social campaigns on Twitter and Facebook and a host of other media spaces.

Another company I talked today is called WhoLinksToMe. WLTM specializes in analysing reputation and SERP rankings through inbound links. We know that inbound links are one of the most important factors to great SEO, but the quality of those links matter too. Who is linking to you? Who isn’t? The service can also tell you who is linking to your competition, but NOT to you.

In addition to the number of links and who they are, WLTM also breaks down inbound links geographically by country so you can how far your brand extends.

These types of services appeal to me as a marketer. I’m always looking for better ways to track how well our message is reaching those on Twitter vs. Facebook vs. YouTube. Does it make more sense to write for Adotas or our own blog? Which AdWords campaigns are bringing me the most leads? Lytiks and WhoLinksToMe can answer many of those questions.

Are you at SXSW? What companies or services have you seen that can help us more intelligently track our metrics?

Last night I was returning from the Ustream party (which was really fun by the way), when I walked into my hotel room found what looked like a newspaper slipped under my door. Because it was late and I was tired, I stepped over it and went to bed. This morning I picked it up off the floor and read it.

I quickly learned it wasn’t really a newspaper – was a marketing piece for a company called Thoora. Thoora is a news and trend aggregation site better than anything I’ve seen. From the site:

“Because Thoora is algorithmically curated it doesn’t pick favorites. Sites like Huffington Post, Lifehacker, Techcrunch, TMZ, Gawker and Mashable will all show up in Thoora results, but so will sites have never heard of like SaulColt.com and JackndJillpolitics.com”

It also looks at things like tweets per hour, Twitter impact, when a story first became popular across the web and how many blogs and news sites are talking about it.

The layout is clean and the view is customizable by category.

In addition to being a great way to get your news from one streamlined source, I also see the tremendous research benefit of a tool like this. As marketers we need to be aware of what’s hot in the world around us. This type of content can help us tell a better story with our marketing efforts that is more timely and plugged in to what people are interested in.

I also have to give Thoora a hat tip for their newspaper idea. Putting marketing materials under hotel room doors at a conference isn’t a new idea, but it’ seldom done this effectively. Taking a pitch about a news site and creating a newspaper out of that day’s hot stories is pretty genius. I kept reading it even once I realized it was a pitch and then went and checked out the site. In a sea of companies trying to get attention at SXSW, Thoora did it well on day two.

Day one at SXSW Interactive and it’s been a whirlwind. Besides doing the tedious stuff like waiting in line to get my badge, pick up the schwag bag and get my press credential and camera tags – I also had some amazing meetings.

My first meeting was with Jason Parrish of Get Smart Content. They are doing some really interesting things with content targeting. They serve specific content based on a user’s geographic laocation, previous websites visited, number of times they’ve visited your site and the keywords they searched to find you. Imagine how much more effective that makes your offerings as a publisher? They’ve had success with clients like the San Antonio Visitor’s Bureau, the NFL and the newly elected Governor of Texas.

I also got a chance to shoot a video piece with Mark Horvath. Mark runs a site called InvisiblePeople.tv which shines a light on the growing problem of homelessness. I can’t say too much about how it will be used, but I can say it will be used in a very public way at SXSW tomorrow.

It’s been a great day so far. It’s such a great feeling to be around people with so much passion for technology and business. I’m looking forward to the next few days. But, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get ready for the opening night Ustream party with Gym Class Heroes and Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy performing!

I’m not in Austin yet, but I wanted to give you an update on what you can expect during our coverage of SXSW Interactive. Several people have reached out via email to setup a time to chat in Austin. Why haven’t you? You can reach me via email at: sparent AT mediatrust DOT com or by sending a tweet to either @AmericanCliche or @MediaTrust. Let’s get together in Austin!

Too often we see people making the leap into social media, only to muck it up with spammy or salesy tactics. While social media can be an amazing way to engage with existing and potential customers and partners, you have to take the right approach. Stephanie Lichtenstein – better known online as MicroSteph - chatted with me about the right and the wrong ways to interact on the social web.

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Putting on Your Work Boots!

“If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.”

I came across this quote recently and I love it. Life is hard, so put on your helmet and read on.
How many times have you heard these questions: What’s hot? What’s working? …and then to go even further – what exactly is working? Check out any busy forum and you’ll see these questions or variations of them over and over again. The thirst for knowledge is ENORMOUS but unfortunately the value and reliability of information in thousands of discussion threads is limited. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good forum but mainly for networking and to be quite frank, for entertainment. Who doesn’t enjoy a good Jerry Springer style spat or an Acai Jell-O fighting video? Looking back, I’m glad I stood outside of the spray zone on that one.

While there’s a lot of quality affiliates ringside and in the forums, the reality is that a super affiliate is not going to divulge their secret sauce on a campaign. You can naturally buy their e-book or sign up to a monthly membership to get access to their tools and strategies but…I regress. The reality is that the answers to almost any important question you have about affiliate marketing is available – not in a thread but by putting on your work boots, doing your own research, forming your own opinions and strategies on how to be successful. Yes the work is hard and yes it is time-consuming – but the EPC competitive advantage and profitability is worth it.

To that point on doing research, I recently skipped Vegas (ouch) and I tried the Electronic Retailers Association show in New Orleans in February – where the Grand Marshall (beads and all) was the FTC. To avoid altering the message any, I listed links below that are very important in regards to understanding the critical changes that affiliate marketing is going through and what the FTC, Credit card companies and legislators are focused on. I hope that this information about the game changers sparks your interest to find out more….and to be more successful in your efforts within the Affiliate Marketing arena.

Video of FTC Presentation:

Please note that Affiliate portion starts at 17:00 and that transparency of CPA payout question is asked and answered at 53:26. I recommend advertisers and affiliates watch the whole presentation.

The spark that started the fire on Continuity based offers

The update on what changed

Mastercard Update and Data Passing Concern:

Free Trial Offers: Recommendations

FTC Advertising Guide on Dietary Supplements

Job Offer Scams

If you have additional links to share please do. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to add me as a Facebook friend at www.facebook.com/topoffers. That’s where I normally broadcast my research.

Maryland Affiliates Call to Arms! Your Voice is Needed!

Affiliates please take the time to participate in this fight that threatens our industry and your livelihood. No matter what size your affiliate business is your voice is needed and does make a difference. An advertising tax bill has been proposed in Maryland, and a hearing has been scheduled for March 17th. If this tax passes, we estimate over 100 advertisers will terminate their affiliate programs with Maryland publishers.

The Performance Marketing Association is the central hub of all of our initiatives and is leading our industries charge to fight this unfair and ill-conceived tax.

“Our effectiveness in fighting legislation that directly harms the income of affiliates will depend on your support. The PMA will be coordinating a targeted grassroots campaign, and we need help from all Maryland affiliate marketers.”

You can learn more about this issue here:

http://www.performancemarketingassociation.com/blog/category/state-legislation/maryland/

You can register your support on the PMA site:

http://performancemarketingassociation.com/advocateform.html

You can also join a group formed for Maryland affiliates: http://groups.google.com/group/pma-md/

Our strength is in our numbers!

If you Twitter please use #NoAdTax to help spread the word in your tweets and Tweet this post ASAP
You can also reach out to the PMA

Rebecca Madigan
Executive Director | Performance Marketing Association
o: 805.445.9700 (PST)