Affiliate Summit East 2009: Day 3

The fact that the Affiliate Summit East 2009 got started on Sunday afternoon made the third day at the Hilton Hotel, in New York, go smoother than I was imagining. The Tuesday was for me more technical and focus on Affiliate Marketing issues, like affiliate campaigns, advertisement and regulations.

Peter Shankman, founder and CEO of The Geek Factory, was the keynote speaker of the day. He is a funny and pretty creative guy, who told the audience about his adventure creating an online business and selling t-shirts at Times Square many years ago.

Shankaman also launched HARO, at HelpAReporter.com, that he created to connect journalists with sources via social media. He reached 5 points that are or are going to be considered very important in human being communitation:

1. Be transparent
2. Be relevant
3. Learn how to write (according to the speaker, 80% of our communication is going to be from written communication)
4. Always arrive to appointments 30 min early to be top of mind
5. Understand that your job is not longer do your own PR, but use Social Media to have people to do it for you

Keeping Your Affiliate Program Clean

My second choice of the day was to go deeper and learn more about affiliate campaigns. The public target of that session was companies with a big number of affiliates. The panel moderated by David Naffziger, CEO of BrandVerity, taught and discussed about tools to manage campaigns, what to expect from affiliates, and terms like "Typosquatting"; – when some desonest affiliate marketers take advantage ot typographical errors made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser to direct them to an alternative website owned by the affiliate.

Hot Topics in Marketing Compliance and Enforcement

That was my last pick for the three days of event. The session was very clarifying about regulations, rules and critical legal issues faced by the Affiliate Marketing industry nowadays. One of the members of the panel pointed a super interesting list about what now can be consider advertisement:

• Traditional media
• Company site
• Public relations
• Spokespeople
• Branded content
• Viral videos
• Products placement
• Reviews site
• Facebook pages
• Blogs
• Twitter profiles

The major advices for affiliate marketers and bloggers paid ny reviews are to always tell the truth and keep their promises.

Ready more about Affiliate Summit East 2009: Day 1 and Affiliate Summit East 2009: Day 2, that happened in August, in New York City.