SEMPO Voting Starts Today

I'm proud to announce that I was nominated for the Board of Directors for SEMPO and I would love your support if you are a member. Voting opens today at 12pm EST and continues through Friday February 15th. Only registered members may vote.

Election results will be announced in late February, and the newly elected Board will begin their term in early March. In mid March, the Board will elect officers for the 2008-2009 year.

Here is the complete list of nominees, thanks for your support!

Damien Anderson, Blowfish Digital Limited
Jay Berkowitz, Ten Golden Rules
Lindsay Blankenship, Avenue A / Razorfish
Chris Boggs, eMergent Marketing
Jessica Bowman, Yahoo!
Paul Bruemmer, Red Door Interactive
Luar Buso, Getupdated
Bruce Clay, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Chris Copeland, Outrider
Fionn Downhill, Elixir Systems
Marc Engelsman, Digital Brand Expressions
Dave Fall, DoubleClick
Mark Fiske, Bazaar Advertising
Duane Forrester, Microsoft
Sara Holoubek, Free Agent
Gordon Hotchkiss, Enquiro Search Solutions
Bill Hunt, Global Strategies International
Mark Jackson, Vizion Interactive
Mike Jacobs, iMarketing LTD
Ron Jones, Symetri Internet Marketing
Max Kalehoff, Clickable
John Koehler, VML
Chris Kramer, NETexponent
Kevin Lee, Didit
Robert Murray, iProspect
Jeffrey Pruitt, iCrossing
Steve Riegel, Faction Media
Farukh Shroff, Solid Cactus
David Szetela, Clix Marketing
Dana Todd, Newsforce
Tanya Vaughan, Hewlett-Packard
Lori Weiman, Click Forensics

WineExpress.com Affiliate Program Launches

I'm proud to announce that NETexponent has officially launched a new affiliate program today on the Performics platform for WineExpress.com. We're offering a $10 commission on all wine clubs and a 10% commission on all other products along with a 30 day return day policy.

WineExpress.com is the select wine shop partner to the Wine Enthusiast's catalog and website. Customers head to Wine Express for unique and exclusive wines that they would not find elsewhere. In addition to exclusivity, WineExpress.com is known for their quality, value, simplicity, and great service. Now is the perfect time to promote this line of products with the holiday season quickly approaching.

If you'd like to apply to become an affiliate for WineExpress.com please click here.

Facebook Is The World's Largest Poker Site

According to Casino Wire, more than 140,000 people a day are playing poker on Facebook.com through various applications. Pokerlistings.com tracks the major online poker websites and ranks Pokerstars.com as the number one with a peak of 134,000 players per day.

Great Article on Affiliate Summit

With Affiliate Summit Miami just a few days away, Adotas has a great feature article on the event:

http://www.adotas.com/2007/07/affiliate-summit-history-in-the-making/

The article takes us through the short history of how this has grown into the premier event for industry in just a few short years. It serves as a reminder that the main reason we go to these events is to network and connect with folks and not just for the stuff we learn at the sessions.

We haven't missed an Affiliate Summit since the first one, we'll continue to support this great event. We'll be giving away a Nintendo Wii at booth #7 - stop by and say hello.

Offensive Marketing - Somebody Thought This Was A Good Idea?

Walking to work today I passed a series of flyers up and down the street for what I thought was a missing person alert. Upon further inspection I see that it reads:

"I am looking for my wife. She has lost 187 lbs using portionpals (this is her before picture) and now that she is skinny I cannot find her. Please help!"

This is one of the most offensive advertising concepts one could possibly think of. Over 2300 people go missing each day in this country and this company creates a fake missing person flyer to sell a diet product?

I called PortionPals for a response and they told me that a "distributor" had posted the flyers and that once alerted to these ads they began taking them down but couldn't finish because of the rain. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt since there was a pretty big storm here last night. In any case - its sunny out now and if I were them I'd get some people to finish the job.

Free Affiliate Summit Passes From NETexponent

Affiliate Summit is almost sold out, but we're giving away 1 full conference pass and 5 exhibit hall passes to the upcoming Affiliate Summit even in Miami.

Click Here for your chance to win:

http://www.netexponent.com/affsummitmiami07.shtml

Hurry - offer ends 6/20. We'll have a booth on the exhibit hall floor and I'll be hosting a round table session, so please stop by if you're planning to attend.

NETexponent Becomes First Agency To Partner with Tumri

I'm proud to announce that my company NETexponent has become the first agency to partner with Tumri, the world's first integrated merchandising and advertising network that intelligently delivers targeted products to online customers. The first 2 NETexponent clients to launch on this platform are Audible.com and WineEnthusiast.com. In case you missed all of the recent great press that they've been getting you can check it out here:

c/net
ClickZ
TechCrunch

Here is a video on how Tumri works, and you can see a cornerstore in action on the bottom right hand side of this page.

I'm very excited to work with the team over at Tumri - they've got a fantastic group of people that have really made this an exciting project to work on. The official release can be found here:

http://www.prweb.com//releases/2007/5/prweb527567.htm

Digg Users Revolt - Take over Homepage

Today is a very interesting day for social media. As reported on CogBox.com, a post came up yesterday on digg that contained a string of numbers and characters that cracked the security code on HD DVD's. After a cease and desist notification from the AACSLA (Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator) digg apparantly removed the posts and immediately suffered a backlash from their users. Several new posts were added, all of which made it to the homepage thanks to the user initiated voting system.

Digg Founder Kevin Rose posted this response last night:

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

Digg was basically caught in a no-win situation. Remove the post and face extinction by having your users revolt and leave or face a potential lawsuit from an organization with very deep pockets. Win or lose you have to admire digg's stance.

No Joke - Incubeta Buys Revenews and CostPerNews.com

The ultimate April Fool's Day prank - Do something for real on April 1st that is big enough to make people think its a prank when it's really true. For 2 days now I just assumed the various posts about Incubeta buying both Revenews.com and CostPerNews.com were part of an elaborate hoax until I finally had to ask Revenews founder Wayne Porter what was up. To quote Wayne: "it is very, very real. You can confirm that publicly my friend, blog it, whatever- 100% truth- swear by a holy scallop" Those of you that know my scallop saga with Wayne know you can trust him when he swears on a scallop.

I have tremendous respect for all the parties involved in this deal. Vinny Lingham's Incubeta is one of the biggest and most professional search affiliate companies out there, Revenews has been an industry staple for nearly 10 years and Sam Harrelson's CostperNews.com was one of the best new sources for online and affiliate information.

I think we can expect some really great things from this brain trust - I can't wait to see what develops. For the full release click here, additional coverage here and here.

What's Going on with UK Affiliate Programs?

First the whole ASOS "Grubby little affiliates" thing (click here if you missed this one) and now UK travel site FlightMapping.com publicly blasts one of their merchant relationships for pulling the plug on their affiliate program:

"Flightmapping director, James Avery, said Flybe’s decision to cut its affiliate campaigns was unacceptable, adding: “It costs them virtually nothing to advertise through affiliates, and at just 1%, Flybe’s commission rate is one of the lowest in the business. How on earth can the airline have used up its budget?”

"Flybe has not played ball, and we find this particularly disappointing considering our tremendous respect for them as an airline. We hope our stance acts as a wake up call."

Finally some excellent advice:

“Learn to respect your affiliates, and they will continue to reward you with bookings at a considerably lower cost (up to 75% lower) than all of your other marketing channels,” he said."

I really have to wonder if Flybe or ASOS have any long term strategy in place as both seem extremely short sighted and misguided if they think they can treat affiliates this way and expect them to come back for more. Flybe should have considered themselves extremely lucky to have a site like FlightMapping.com promoting them for only 1% revenue share, instead they burned a bridge that seems unlikely to be repaired.