Amazon Associates is the partner program the company uses as part of its affiliate advertising programs, allowing customers to make money advertising Amazon products.
Associates can now simply click a link in the toolbar to send a link (replete with sales-y text) to Twitter as part of their shopping and selling experience. Amazon gets a sale, Twitter gets traffic, and the associate gets revenue share. What could possibly go wrong?
Linking to Amazon or other online retailers is obviously nothing new, though Amazon has been particularly successful in using its link networks for both sales and to garner higher Google rankings for organic advertising.
This new program does introduce an issue related to link fraud, where spammers and scammers leverage URL-shortening services for spam links. Currently there is no way to verify that the link you click actually goes to Amazon. It's a bit surprising that it decided to use an URL-shortener that it doesn't own, though I suppose the network effect of the URLs helps perpetuate the life of the links.
There is also a risk of nondisclosure wherein in Twitter users attempt to push products that offer some kind of gain to them that they don't clearly state to you. While I understand the argument for disclosure on blogs and media in general, Twitter remains a playground for people to post whatever they want. I highly doubt all the celebrities with accounts would bother wasting their precious time if they weren't posting for their own gain.
Interestingly, there is no mention of whether Twitter is an Amazon Associate, suggesting that Twitter won't see any of the revenue share. I'd like to think that they cut a deal that gives them a piece of the pie, but to date we haven't seen Twitter monetize itself too effectively.
Twitter is quickly becoming the flash news vehicle for everything from news alerts to product placement. And based on a very quick review of my Bitly account, Twitter users just love to click on links. But, I still have to wonder if Twitter will ever get beyond its current role as a marketing tool?
As much as Twitter is a powerful communication and social application, it's a relatively simple Web app. As part of a new contest sponsored by Engine Yard, Ruby on Rails developers are going to turn Twitter into their own application server.
The contest asks developers to program the "Worst App Server Technology Ever" (Waste) using Twitter as the message bus. While much of the contest is being done tongue-in-cheek, it's actually an interesting use case to see if a service like Twitter can take the place of a more traditional message bus like IBM MQ series or AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol).
Contest participants register up to five Twitter handles and code the function that each would perform in a program. When the contest challenge is issued on November 12, participants will have to use at least 10 of the pre-designated Twitter handles (other than their own) as endpoints to perform functions on data sets located at unique URLs. All messages will work through a series of automated public Twitter replies.
This is somewhere between an application server, a social game, the "telephone game" and service-oriented architecture (SOA) where Twitter plays the role of the enterprise service bus and the Twitter API is the broker between data sources. SOA relies on services exposing their functionality other applications and services can read to understand how to utilize those services. In this case, Twitter can be used as an application server in the cloud. (Take that buzzword bingo players.)
The funny thing is that as absurd and comical as this sounded when the Engine Yard guys told me about it, I've started to think about this as a way to possibly achieve a real technological breakthrough. And while I don't think that Twitter will be the "cloud bus," I do think that there is a lot to be learned from applying this type of constraint to a data flow process.
Engine Yard VP of marketing Michael Mullany told me that the contest shows how developers can leverage a relatively straightforward platform in innovative ways. But it's also another example of an interesting marketing effort to use Twitter as the vehicle for one's own benefit. Also, in true open source fashion, developers wind up building new applications based on code written by their peers.
Let's hope Twitter can handle the attention and developers are not greeted by the ever-lurking fail whale. You can check out the contest and learn more details at Engineyard.com
IBM on Monday is expected to release a new enterprise collaboration service based on its LotusLive cloud-based platform. The service comes with 1GB of storage and will cost $3.75 per user per month.
The new IBM LotusLive iNotes service is IBM's first real foray into a mass-market cloud-based service, including e-mail, calendaring, and contact management all designed to work with existing on-premise e-mail or operate as a standalone solution. Per user pricing will start at just $3 per month.
Realistically, the new IBM service isn't much different than you see from the likes of Google Apps or Yahoo--the big change is that it's coming from IBM, an enterprise stalwart. Whether you like Lotus Notes or not, this is big news as an endorsement of cloud computing and hosted applications.
Sean Poulley, vice president of IBM Cloud Collaboration Services, said customers have been looking for strategic versions of hosted solutions for a long time. The cloud approach of multitenancy means that the real cost of IT--the cost of running the applications--is reduced, bringing economies of scale to the offerings. IBM has been working on making the service secure and "enterprise ready," he said.
IBM's decision to start offering more cloud-based services is predicated on the notion that fewer people in IT organizations are carrying more responsibility. They are also more dependent on people outside of their organizations that need access to shared documents and files. On-premise collaboration applications can likely be manipulated to work in a shared manner, but LotusLive has been designed to work that way from the ground up.
When I asked why IBM would brand the new service as part of the Lotus family, Poulley said that more than half of the Fortune 100 companies use IBM collaboration technology that includes Lotus Notes and are well aware of the brand.
Several months back I wrote about Microsoft's Songsmith video that hit all the wrong notes. It was a weird (to say the least) attempt to humanize software that failed so terribly I still find it hard to believe it was real.
Enter the latest Windows 7 launch video, which looks like the Food Network threw a cooking party only to have it geek out and go completely sideways.
Maybe all the pressure to make Windows 7 successful has removed all sensibility to marketing efforts that seem like good ideas until they are actually created.
Beverage brand Vitaminwater, known for both tasty thirst quenchers and creative marketing, on Tuesday launched "Flavorcreator" a Facebook application designed to crowdsource ideas for new beverage flavors. The company plans to announce the new flavor in December, with the product slated to hit shelves next March.
In addition to voting on new flavors, Flavorcreator lets users play games and win prizes while providing the company with valuable market research and building brand awareness.
Although I still don't personally enjoy Facebook, I do think that it has potential as a marketing tool. There is clear value in targeting and defining a target audience segment in this way, provided that the application is attractive and well-designed (Flavorcreator is both), presumably leading to higher levels of interest and user interaction.
... Read more
A new survey of chief marketing officers (CMOs) conducted by Heidrick & Struggles and Digital Scientists reveals that CMOs across nearly all sectors believe their companies are under-delivering in the area of digital marketing.
Digital marketing is obviously a broad term, encompassing everything from online advertising and social media to generalized customer-acquisition and awareness programs. And really digital marketing is just another avenue of marketing's overarching goal: having what people want.
Regardless of the method or delivery mechanism there are two universal rules related to sales and marketing:
- Marketing is having what people want
- Sales is getting rid of what you have
The two items above are arguably the most important things I learned in business school, and frame (for better or worse) the way that I think about product development, marketing, and so on.
The survey also showed that marketers rely on digital marketing proficiency as a way to acquire new customers, while brand-building and geographic expansion of markets were seen as much less important.
Other key survey findings:
- Proficiency in digital marketing is highly valued, but under-delivered
- There is an over-reliance on outside agencies to meet talent gap
- Key growth tactics: high points for analytics and search engine optimization, low points for new media advertising
- Few are satisfied with their company's marketing effectiveness.
- Marketers need more help from IT
- Few want to focus on global growth
As always, surveys need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's good to see that marketers realize that they aren't yet taking full advantage of available tools and that there are options to learn more and build new programs.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
A number of well-known brands disappeared in the last year due to economic forces and bad management. Circuit City, Aloha Airlines, and Washington Mutual come to mind as examples.
24/7 Wall St. examined 100 large brands that are facing troubled futures. The analysis included records for those brands that are public companies or part of public companies.
The 12 major brands most likely to disappear in 2009:
- Avis
- Borders
- Crocs
- Saturn
- Esquire Magazine
- Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic
- Architectural Digest
- Chrysler
- Eddie Bauer
- Palm
- AIG
- United, American or US Air
Full details and explanations are available at 24/7 Wall Street.
Via Cote
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
Today's big tech news in the United Kingdom is a self-serving prognostication that once again states that "open source is less secure" than proprietary software.
This comes from a U.S. company called Fortify, whose business it is to search for code flaws. Citing its own research, Fortify suggests that open source as a whole is inherently less secure and therefore, the U.K. government shouldn't use open source. However, it fails to note that many open-source projects have commercial companies behind them, which effectively puts the software on equal footing.
"That's not to say that commercial software isn't without risks, but any flaws on commercial applications tend to get patched a lot faster than on open source, as the vendors producing the software have a lot more to lose than an open-source programmer," Fortify Vice President Richard Kirk claimed.
The statements from Fortify also neglect to mention that it tested a limited number of open-source Java software or that it has been a Microsoft partner. But we'll ignore that and assume that it's a marketing exercise to freak out Europeans.
In the past, I've found Europe to be challenging to monetize, but not because of security issues. Open-source adoption in Europe is huge--especially in the United Kingdom, but the term has really meant "free" for most of the continent.
The U.K. and European Union parliaments are heavy users of open-source software, and I have yet to hear that any government branch or enterprise is adopting open source less. The reality is that open source has corrupted the market for big vendors and is slowly, but surely, delving into every area of system and application infrastructure.
As fellow CNET Blog Network writer Matt Asay noted on Thursday, some organizations are mandating open source. I'm not convinced that mandates are the right answer, but it's clear that IT buyers are fed up with exorbitant licensing costs. And you have to marvel at the fact that open source has become so mainstream that government officials are publicly fighting about it.
You can also check out Glyn Moody's take on this story.
I can only assume these characters battle "Blue Screen of Death" and "The Googlebot"
The most disturbing thing is that I like the same band as Visual Studio Guy. Sigh.- prev
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