The federal Trade Commission is going to be looking at setting guidelines and standards for best practices for the online marketing industry and consumers. The FTC is suggesting that bloggers and social media marketers who use false statements about products they promote will be held liable. If the proposed guidelines come into effect, affiliate publishers and marketers will need to use the same sort of strategies and care that traditional publishers and infomercial producers do.

This is part of the FTC’s advertising-practices divisions effort to “update guidelines that are 30 years old.”

The FTC commissioners will be voting on the new proposed guidelines later in the summer. This is part of the new regulation-minded administration in Washington that wants to set better standards, definitions and best practices in the online marketing industry.The administration will be formalizing many areas of our business’s framework from paying taxes to outlawing unethical business practices.

The online marketing industry is still very young and has been allowed to have too much undefined grey area for marketers and consumers. This effort will cause some initial pain and awkwardness for some of our online marketing community, but in the long run our industry will greatly benefit. This will create a more solid foundation and greater credibility for growth – especially in the the performance marketing segment of our markets.

We will be launching a compliance resource center in our platform for our advertising and affiliate publisher partners. The center will be updated with all the new policies and procedures plus other hosted compliance solutions. We are looking forward to our industry’s next evolution in becoming a more mature and vibrant business. Stay tuned and also make sure to reach out to us if you need any help understanding the many moving parts of compliance and our markets.

Is Twitter the most powerful marketing tool since television? My first day at SES NY answered just that. Attending Guy Kawasaki’s “Nobodies are the new somebodies” keynote this morning opened my eyes to one of the newest social media aspects of target marketing: a tweet. So what is the buzz about? Twitter can be used as a versatile website to measure, monitor, and promote your brand or service. Guy made a great point by mentioning that not only is Twitter free to sign up and you’re able to reach your audience with just one click, but it doesn’t matter if you are Bill Gates or Joe living down the street, you still get only the same 140 characters to update your status. Guy also gave some interesting yet controversial Twitter tips such as auto follow everyone who follows you and to use TwitterHawk.com, which is a tool that auto messages fellow tweeters who have a certain keyword in their tweet. Laughing, Guy considered himself not a spammer, but more of a marketer. He said to take advantage of Twitter tools such as TweetDeck, which may not be limited to one account in the near future and ReTweetist.com, which ranks retweets (RT) by number in a single interface. Guy ended with a tip on “taking the heat” which I thought was right on target. Not everyone is going to agree with what you tweet, and I think that’s where the most interesting aspect comes into play on Twitter – whether it’s good or bad feedback it can only improve your company’s brand.

The Twitter buzz was also mentioned today in SearchAppalooza, which was sponsored by Chitika. One of the newest search engine websites: NearByTweets.com localizes twitter, which is almost making it too easy for marketers to reach their target audience. NearByTweets.com allows people to search for keywords in any tweet from fellow tweeters in a specific area. I encourage you all to check it out and let us know what you think.

SXSW: A forum to look into the future of our industry

We recently co-sponsored a survey of affiliates with eConsultancy, a UK based research shop. Aside form the usual branding benefits that go along with such an endeavor, we believe this type of activity is key to maintain a dialog with publishers of all sizes and shapes to reveal trends, technologies and best practices that help shape the way the performance marketing channel is evolving. SXSW is a great forum for such dialog and we hope that you enjoy Scott’s coverage of the event.

To take a page out of the Beastie Boys book, I “sample my own track” and quote something below that I wrote to preamble the research:

Performance marketing is evolving rapidly and the input and feedback of the publisher-base is critical to the success of the ecosystem that exists among marketers, publishers and end users. As the performance marketing model implies, we all benefit only when all members of our ecosystem are satisfied. This means that an ongoing dialogue is necessary among all parties in this ecosystem and important to our collective evolution as an industry…As an industry, we collectively seek to provide more value to (these constituents) so that our relationships with them grow stronger and more lucrative. Our hope is that with a continued dialogue among affiliate publishers of all sizes, collectively, we will be able to deliver a higher quality service to the brands we serve today and the ones we look to serve in the future.

The tools, technologies and ‘memes’ that saturate the South by Southwest event are critical to our movemenet forward as an industry. The capturing and sharing of the up and coming online behaviors and tools will help us better serve the publishers, advertisers, and customers within our industry ecosystem. We look forward to what we will learn, and we hope you do to! Feel free to submit any trends or thoughts you may have on where things are going so that we can report back to you!

I have written for our blog about tech, or events, or worked with Producer Extraordinaire Scott Parent to provide you with podcast content we have felt would be useful to our friends in the performance marketing industry. But today I am switching hats and wanted to talk about our recent overhaul of our flagship platform Advaliant.

As most of you know by now, we finished an end to end redesign of Advaliant and released it to our customers earlier this year. As the Creative Director of MediaTrust, and one third of the leadership team of the MediaTrust Products Group, first let me say thank you for all the feedback we have received, both positive and negative. Your help in assessing features and functions, as well as assisting in killing the few remaining bugs has been invaluable to us, and your ideas about what we could do to increase the value of Advaliant as a service platform has been extremely insightful. We are testing the theory of the “wisdom of the crowds” in a real-time fashion with our customers and it seems to be proving itself out. Thank you for your input.

Last year we had an internal summit with key individuals across all divisions of the company. One of the top findings that came out as a result of this summit was that our platform was not doing what it should to support your business. We had not progressed fast enough to stay on pace with our competitors, our industry, and the functionality our customers required. We made a commitment that not only would we improve upon every basic feature and function that is required to support your business as a performance marketer, but we would begin to innovate on those functions and again become the leader in the performance marketing industry.

The platform release that you are currently using is just the first step of many. We redesigned the user interface do make your tasks easier to complete. We restructured more than 75% of the underlying code base to speed up the platform, insure data integrity, and create an overall performance lift in the benefit of Advaliant to our customers. But this is only the beginning of a year-long plan of innovation and execution.

Over the course of the next 10 months you may not see radical changes, as many of the improvements to the UI have been completed, but you should feel the changes. Reports will be snappier, our data visualization will crackle and requests will pop to completion. Our plans for improved or added features and functions will not just get us back in the game as a leading platform, but it will become the platform of choice, because of the input you have provided for us. Advaliant has always enjoyed a great reputation as a hardworking, insightful and honest performance marketing company. Now we want to add industry technology leader to the reputation you have helped us build. And again, we thank you for that.

If you have feedback for us, you can always send it via the feedback links in the platform after you log in and review your current earning, or after running our newest campaigns. You can also send an email to your account manager who will be certain to get that feedback to us in the product team. As always, we love to read your comments below, here on the blog.

We’re taking Relevantly Speaking on the road again this year to Austin Texas. You may have caught some of our coverage last year when we spoke to people from Blurb, iStockphoto, Socialthing, Kyte and frog design. We also spoke to visionaries like Shiv Singh and Audrey Shedivy. 

And, who could forget our daily video updates and live-blogging?

This year we’re doing it all again and we need your help. Do you have something to say about performance marketing, social media, search marketing, mobile or emerging technology in the online marketing space? Maybe you have a story about how the economy has affected your business. Are you using affiliate marketing successfully? If your answer to any of these questions is “yes,” then we want to hear from you.

We’ll be doing interviews at SXSW Interactive from March 13th – March 17th. Please email me at sparent at mediatrust dot com to tell me about yourself and arrange a time to chat.

MediaTrust is on today’s eComXpo PANEL: Progressively Moving Towards A Path Of Standardization, Self Governance And Self Regulation As An industry – Can This Become A Reality? at 3pm EST.

Moderator: Jeff Molander, Co-editor, Paying for Performance and CEO Molander & Assoc. Inc.
Panelists: Rebecca Madigan, Founding Organizer, Performance Marketing Alliance
Brad Waller, VP, Affiliate & Business Development, Epage Classifieds
Peter Bordes, Chief Executive Officer, MediaTrust

We are honored and thrilled to be participating in this panel led by Jeff Molander. The topic is one of great importance to us and for the future of the performance marketing industry. The industry is standing in front of a great opportunity to enter into a significant growth period that is being accelerated by the economic down turn. More and more large brands & agencies are looking to enter the performance marketing space this year. At this years Affiliate Summit West 20+% of the attendees were all new to the industry and  JP Morgan Sees Long-Term Dominance For Performance-based Ads in 2009 and beyond.

The performance marketing segment of the online advertising industry is very large, fragmented and siloed. By coming together as a united community we can create a large global opportunity by work together setting standards and guidelines so that we can grow significantly. It is a very important initiative that will allow us to move away from our “red headed stop child of the industry” legacy and step into a leadership position.

In order for this to happen we all must work together. Affiliates, publishers, marketers, advertisers, merchants, networks, service providers working to set the stage for the future of all our success.

Can we move towards a path of standardization, self governance and regulation as an industry? Can this become a reality?

The panel session will cover all the issues ::

Get up to date on where affiliate marketing stands with industry self-governance. In an industry that is often seen trying to talk its way out of situations it’s behaved itself into, the challenge is obvious: credibility, accountability and standards that lead to growth and respect of the performance-based segment of web marketing.

Our focus will be *less* on the need and more on the *how to* tactics moving forward… what the road map each panelist believes is best.  We’d like to see some disagreement if possible… and dissection of past failures (to avoid in future).

Challenges
* Governmental regulation and taxation  (i.e. all the FTC actions of years past; NY state tax on affiliate sales, etc.)
* Influencing value perceptions of key constituent groups (ie. marketers/advertisers, government regulators) to the extent of creating new behavior (investment in the industry)
* Bad practices — managing them.

Action Items
* The industry needs an association — what is required to set one up?  Is it working so far?
* Professional certification — who, what, how?
* How can the industry develop a system to police and correct bad practices and future legislation?
* Identify steps required to develop standards and provide professional education
* Self governance & ethical behavior

We look forward to everyones participating in the very important panel discussion.

I was front row and center for the panel “Social Media Risks and Rewards” today at Affiliate Summit West. In addition to our own, Jivan Manhas, the panel included Gary Kibel of Davis & Gilbert, Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions, Will Haselden of the Office of the Attorney General for the State of Florida, and Mike Kowal of Linkshare.

Each panelist was able to give a 5-7 minute presentation. They each took a different approach – you had two legal perspectives, an overall generalist’s intro to social media, and practical examples from performance marketers.

Jivan’s presentation centered around real-world examples of affiliates using social media to drive revenue. He cited platforms like Facebook and Flickr, as well as ways bloggers are leveraging their audiences to increase volume and sales.

One theme that continued to surface among all the panelists is transparency and disclosure around things like privacy policies and terms of service. It was also interesting to see the progression of larger brands like Kmart embracing the space.

The world of social media continues to evolve, and has changed substantially even since Jivan spoke at the Affiliate Summit Social Media Conference in October. With the changing economy and shifting tide of affiliate marketing, social media may play a bigger role than ever as 2009 unfolds.

It’s been an interesting year in performance marketing. The slowdown in the economy has shifted the dynamics in the space, the Amazon Tax was all the rage, and Google plunged head-first into the affiliate world.

What will 2009 hold? How will the economy continue to shape the performance marketing business? How will social networking impact what we do? What company will emerge as a market leader? We rounded up some of our best and brightest partners in the business of Performance Marketing to ask them about their thoughts on 2009. Here’s what they had to say:

Angel Djambazov – Managing Editor, Revenews

1. ValueClick will either be bought or drastically change their portfolio so as not to be damaged by the CPM down turn.

2. Remnant media buys will increase as people take advantage of CPM/CPA hybrids

3. Microsoft will take steps to fix its LiveSearch Black Friday fiasco

4. Zune will launch an affiliate program to go with its new phone

5. More “green” focused merchants will enter the space

Hamlet Batista - President and CEO/Nemedia S.A.

1. PPC costs will keep rising creating a greater interest in SEO

2. Quality links will become far more valuable and harder to get as SEO goes mainstream

3. Website publishers will become more reluctant to link out unless there is something in it for them.

4. Google will start placing more weight on other “branding” signals besides just plain links in an attempt to diminish the value of purchased links.

6. Black Hat SEOs will have to begin using more sophisticated methods such as generating fake traffic to websites and to tricking social media users into visiting sites.

7. The number of fake social media profiles and automated posting robots will increase drastically.

8. On the brigther side, more people will become aware of how to optimize their sites, choose the best keywords, etc. and there will be more organic competition in the SERPs (serarch engine result pages).

9. In search of new opportunities, forward-looking SEOs will explore the mobile space.

10. A new stealth search engine startup will challenge Google and dominate the market.

Jeff Molander - CEO, Molander & Associates Inc.

Due to the global consumer spending slowdown, 2009 will be the year when chief marketers finally understand what it takes to achieve success: The marriage of Web analytics with BUSINESS analytics. Success is now driven by a company’s ability to listen to its market and immediately ACT based on it’s “demand pulse” — participate authentically in the enrichment of its customers lives in real time, beyond krass sales pitches, to drive sales and leads.  Success will be defined in terms of a company’s ability to listen, learn and act — optimize in real time.  Watch for the leaders to only hire people who are passionate about getting there — people with “analtyics DNA” in their blood. 

Jessica Luthi – AffiliateProgramAdvice.com

Credit crunch will kick in and a few companies will fall by the way side the mom and pop stores. We may see larger companies merge in order to protect their businesses. Im already seeing this in terms of the retail sectors at supplier level and also from the feedback I got at Magic (Vegas 2008) The banks are calling loans in.

Upside, affiliate marketing can only increase and Im already seeing this happening with APA, but taking on new clients comes with a new set of problems, are they looking for a last ditch quick fix. So due diligence needs to be stepped up for all of us. Here in the UK, this raised an eyebrow for me.

Andrew O’Halloran – Privacy Officer, Cypra Media

1. 2009 will be a record year for hard bounces from B2B email campaigns. Because of the economic crisis causing millions to lose their jobs and corporate email addresses, 2009 will be the year where a record number of hard bounces will be recorded from B2B email campaigns.

2. Canada will (finally) pass its own anti-spam bill. Canada gained worldwide notoriety and embarrassment in November 2008 after the Montreal based spammer Adam Guerbuez was prosecuted and fined over $873 million by American courts under the US CAN-SPAM act. The main legal structure presently used to resolve anti-spam complaints is Canada’s “Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act” (PIPEDA). While the PIPEDA legal framework and jurisprudence provides a legal guide, both clarity and force will be improved by passing a law specific for unsolicited commercial electronic messages. Similar to the US CAN-SPAM Act, the proposed new Canadian anti-spam law should have teeth with

3. Data will be more tightly controlled, better analyzed, and better managed. Or else. Businesses will increasingly consider how their email marketing strategy affects not only the bottom line in the next quarter, but also what costs an overly aggressive monetizing strategy may have on long-term profitability and brand reputation. Research preceding the actual email marketing campaign will be given more focus as businesses recognize the value of investing time and resources to understand their consumers’ mailing frequency preferences, interests, demographics, pet peeves, and concerns, etc… List size will become less important than list quality. By contrast, those businesses who either do not want to make the investment in understanding their consumer base or have not put in places resources to do so will find it increasingly difficult to monetize data and risk damage to their company and brand reputation.

Robert Bergquist – President & CEO, Widemile

The focus of all marketers in 2009 must be on ROMI – return on marketing investment.  It’s not about brand building.  In 2009 it’s about generating a measurable return from each marketing dollar spent.   Since it’s much easier to track the returns generated by digital marketing tactics, especially paid search and affiliate marketing, those budgets will remain intact and likely grow, while other forms of advertising will suffer.    
 
To succeed in this recessionary economy, marketers must think like a CFO and aggressively track each dollar spent against profitable revenue generated.   You must demand accountability and better performance from each link in your sales funnel, from customer acquisition to conversion and retention. Your job depends upon it.

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There you have it – predictions from several disciplines across the performance marketing space. It will be interesting to watch as 2009 unfolds to see how many of these turn out to be true. One things for sure, 2009 is poised to be an exciting year in the space.

A very special thanks to Garr Reynolds for featuring this TED presentation today. I would love to have Benjamin Zander as an instructor, or a mentor. This morning, during coffee, when I usually catch up on the things that have already happened, I spent the 20 minutes or so learning about the things that MIGHT happen. I was so inspired by how he worked with his student to break apart music for Cello and actually begin to look at the parts, and place between the notes, and the connections between not only the pieces and the parts and the spaces, but connections those things have to each other AND to the audience. Benjamin also included the connection to the artist, a 15 year old talent named Nicholi, and inspired him to change his interaction with the music as well.

I am sure you will all take away a different nugget or two of wisdom, or inspiration or whatever… but I am so fully inspired to look at those parts of the whole, the spaces between the notes, and see if I can not add a different sense of beauty, of perspective, or of interpretation with the new work I am doing (more on that later).

I also hope to bring you a review of Benjamin’s book, The Art of Possibility. I am still reading Guy Kawasaki’s new tome Reality Check and will move on to Zander’s book after that. Special thanks to Guy and his people over at Penguin Group who sent me an extra copy of Reality Check for our readers. Tell me what inspired you about the Zander presentation from TED in the comments, and I’ll send Guy’s book to one of you.