Or should that be “Words”?
However, you cut it and define it, there’re marketers out there who do their best to make use of Twitter, Squidoo, Hubpages, MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, Metacafe, Youtube, Revver, forums and other social networking site (of the “Web 2.0″ ilk) to generate adsense or affiliate income.
Some of them are spectacularly successful, while others just flame up and die, and have their accounts deleted en-masse.
So is Web 2.0 a “dead” technology for marketers?
Are Web 2.0 site destined to become a dead graveyard populated by “internet polluters“?
I don’t think so.
This issue came up during the taping of a Friday Podcast session with Affiliate Classroom’s Marketing VP and affiliate marketing industry veteran Rachel Honoway.
I was pretty impressed that Web 2.0-based affiliates ranked alongside SEO, PPC, Coupon, shopping comparison and other types of profiled affiliates in Affiliate Classroom’s new AC Certified program for Affiliate Managers.
If you recall, Jim Kukral presented a session on “Bloggers as the Next Generation of Super Affiliates” at Affiliate Summit West 2007.
And it’s great to see these new generation of affiliate marketers being profiled in the new program, and even better, there’re tips for new and experienced affiliate managers to reach out to these marketers.
But back to “Web 2.0″ for a second.
If you’ve been reading this blog over the last couple of weeks, you’d pick up the thread that this new breed of affiliates is focused on building conversations/conversation marketing as Internet Geek Girl Steph Agresta would say.
It’s about relationship marketing and community marketing…permission marketing plays a part in there as well.
For it to be truly effective, you need to be able to meet your prospects needs, and not bank on using a bunch of bulletins or PMs or mass broadcasts to bombard them with irrelevant offers (even at $100 a lead…), just because the technologies let you do so.
If I had my way, I’d hit the internet and do a global “search-and-replace” and replace all references of “web 2.0″ with “social traffic” or “community building”.
But then again, isn’t enforcing your opinion on a mass basis, the equivalent of “curation” (a nice politically-correct phrase for “censorship”)?
I think I like freedom of expression better, so this is going into my Twitter stream.
