Tim.McGuinn.es/s

Just spell it out

Affiliate Marketing – Without a Net

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Install. Forget.

Install. Forget.

A few weeks ago I wrote about converting SoccerClub.com to a social network from its original Web 1.0 format and the subsequent revenue drop. The story at the time was that the Google Adsense links took a serious click-thru hit in the new format, even though page views were way up. This confirms the issues that face big-league social networks like Facebook and Myspace, but now it was affecting my “Tortured-NY-Sports-Fan” ticket account. I mean I have a late season collapse by the Rangers coming up in April to attend.

A man has to eat, so I decided to jump into the world of affiliate marketing. The steps were easy to outline:
1) Sign up for affiliate networks — The key was to find networks that offer soccer-related ads. I signed up for a couple of the leading services, Linkshare and Commission Junction, because they represent many of the big box sports stores and some specialty shops, like Soccer.com and SoccerGarage.com. I also signed up for a smaller service called Shareasale.com who represents SoccerPost.com.
2) Upgrade Ad Server — Sounds like a scary high-tech nightmare. It was. I installed the Open Ads software 3 years ago to serve banners on the original site, but I had NO IDEA how it was working. It just did. I had a message in my inbox that suggested I upgrade to the new Open X version, so I figured — why not give it a try and ruin everything. I couldn’t even remember how to do a back-up, so I was working without a net. Well I did it, and it works!! Cue the engineer dance music.
3) Find the banners — This was like crawling through a dark room to find a flashlight, only to learn that you then had to find new batteries. After pulling the HTML code for the banners, I had to figure out how to set up a test page so I could see how to set the display banners. Once again, it worked*. Amazing. So I loaded up the new banners and they are appearing now.

* The asterisk — Technically the banners are displaying, so it “works.” Unfortunately, no one is buying, so it’s not working too well. So there have been extra late-night meetings over pizza between the engineering director and the business manager. However, it’s only been two weeks, so I have continued to expand the banner coverage and monitor the reports to see what works. I have stayed true to the sports / soccer relevancy for the most part. I’ll admit that I slipped in a Match.com link to see how it performs. Ya gotta do, what ya gotta do to pay for those pizzas.

More updates after I let this run for a full month.

The Licensing of Tmac — Ground Rules

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Bad News for Red Stripe

Bad News for Red Stripe

I am all for the idea of making some money where it can be made, but there’s one area that irks me a little, and that is the licensing of a person’s name or likeness after their death.

Today’s Wall Street Journal, has a article about Bob Marley’s family working with Hilco Consumer Capital to use Bob Marley’s name and likeness. One of the first products on the list is a “Marley Lager, a Jamaican beer featuring the singer’s likeness.” This means sell your Red Stripe stock.

Now, the Marley family and a private equity firm that invests in retail brands are preparing a major push to license Mr. Marley’s likeness, trademarks and themes to apparel, food and even video games. Hilco Consumer Capital, which has compiled a stable of retail brands including Halston and Ellen Tracy, this month invested some $20 million for half of House of Marley LLC, a joint venture with the Marley family, according to people familiar with the matter.

I am not sure how Bob would treat this idea, but in case my family gets any ideas about licensing my image, I have set some ground rules for the products that I will allow. Here we go:

  • Bowling Shoes — For the shoe fashionista who is comfortable to let others know their foot size.
  • No-Tuck Shirts — The first cool guy that made wearing untucked shirts fashionable is a man that we should all envy, and I would like to think I can take that guy’s credit by attaching my name to this fashion trend.
  • Instant Coffee Brandy — Who has time to mix a Down East Maine “Brandy”? I mean Coffee Brandy, milk and ice (optional) takes way too long to get right, so let’s just create a freeze dried version, with my name on the label, that packs the fun of alcohol and caffeine without filling us up.

What would you allow? Add it in the comments below.

Super Bowl XLIII – Super Bowl XXXIIII = X

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Finally I can say it -- This was not even the worst thing that happened to Eugene Robinson that day.

Finally I can say it -- This was not even the worst thing that happened to Eugene Robinson that day.

Watching the game yesterday, it hit me that it has been X years (10 to you non-Romans) since my big break came when I worked on the SuperBowl.com site for the 1999 game between Denver and Atlanta.

The biggest change in that time is how SuperBowl.com handles news. The site was being produced and managed at Lycos under the strict guidance of the NFL which means at that time the site was just NFL propaganda. That was the year that Eugene Robinson of Atlanta found himself arrested for solicitation the night before the game. Big news, obviously, but we were not allowed by the NFL to mention it. The rules were so strict on blocking bad news that we were not allowed to even link to articles where coaches were being fired, and that’s all of the news during the weeks of the playoff run.

My involvement started as a photo editor for a six-week contract which became an offer to be the Lycos Search Producer. By Super Bowl night, I had worked myself up to where they trusted me with the keys to the whole site so I was publishing content from a dark, cold office park in Waltham until late into the night with my developer Mats. That was the year that Denver beat my Jets in the AFC Championship. I always wondered if I would have been able to come up with the pitch to go to Miami if the Jets were in the Super Bowl … if the Jets were Super Bowl (I seem to say that alot). My confetti celebration that night was a leftover pizza and a couple of beers around 3am while I watched game highlights on ESPN. There is nothing like game day.

Online Journalism — Past, Present, and Future(?)

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Before we start, I have to share a fear. Since I am writing about journalists and news, a real journalist may read this. That’s like playing golf with a PGA pro, except I can’t blame sentence structure on the wind. So now let’s start …

Even an icy morning did not stop a full room from gathering at The Harvard Club for The Future of News and Information panels presented as part of The Digital Breakfast series by Gotham Media. The first panel was a group of savvy news people that work in a day-to-day news creation role and the second panel featured a group that is using new publishing technologies and models to build, support, or maybe destroy (depends on your view) the news business as we see it today.

I’ll start by saying that I have always been a newspaper and magazine guy. I still subscribe to three newspapers, even during this “demise” of the newspaper business. In saying that, I know the problem because I was there at the beginning. When I lived in Boston, I would occasionally trek over to Out-of-Town News in Cambridge to load up on New York papers that covered Mets spring training or grab the Newark Star Ledger for job listings in New Jersey (forgive me, but I was young and wanted everyday to be a Wildwood summer day). The Internet ended that. I no longer had to buy the NY Daily News to read Lupica or The NY Post to read headline puns; I could do that online (or read the Boston Herald we used to line the parrot’s cage).

Back to the panels…The first panel was moderated by Andy Nibley, Chairman and CEO at Marsteller, and it included Tom Bettag, formally of Discovery and ABC News, Chrystia Freeland from Financial Times, and a brink-of-being-angry Martin Nisenholtz from NY Times Digital. Some points that they covered were that they felt you could charge for content, a model used by FT, but that content needed to be special and unique and it needed to add a level of value to the subscriber’s life, but what is that price point? Local news was unique, but had very low perceived value, whereas content that can help make or save the subscriber time or money could be packaged for a price. You can read more here from Kelly Samardak in the Online Minute.

The second panel featured new technology and services that could either enhance the news experience or provided a new means for building or aggregating an online presence. First up was Apture, and they offer a publishing tool that allows a publisher to link to supporting content that will display as on-domain content in a pop-up window. The idea is to keep the user on your site. It sounds very interesting, and I plan to investigate its free personal version very soon. Keith McAllister of Mochila outlined how they provided news publishers a chance to back fill their original content with news pulled from their syndication partners, such as Reuters, AP, Getty Images and many more. Andrea Spiegel of True/Slant (and formally down the hall from me at AOL where she had an office and I had a cube), explained that the yet-to-be-launched service focuses on aggregating content around a “Name” contributor, and then provide the contributor a chance to add their voice around the news of the day. They are looking for contributing specialists to fill out their line-up, so visit their site and submit your name. A couple of observations are that: 1) Mochilla seems like a perfect content supplier for Apture; 2) the old-school journalists in the office are very shaky when they saw Wikipedia being used and in discussions about identifying authoritative news sources, and 3) Unigo was the fourth company, but as a standalone publisher of a successful online college guide they are outside the scope of the other tools presented.

NY Tech Meetup – Tweets Into 2009

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Tuesday night’s NY Tech Meetup was the first with new organizer Nate Westheimer in charge and the crowds still kept growing, filling the IAC lobby hall. After a brief intro from former NYTM organizer and still Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman, Nate took the “oath” of office by placing his right hand on a MacBook held by the original assistant organizer Dawn Barber. Funny, certainly geeky, but a good way to focus all those in attendance about the purpose of the NY Tech Meetup.

You don’t always love all the demos you see at the NYTM, but there are certainly times when you see something that rings a bell and may foster a new idea or application in your mind. Last night there were a couple of these, and I have linked off to Allen Stern’s Center Networks site where he has the video of the presentation.

Co-Tweet — The ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts by multiple people. I know this issue from trying to manage the tweets for my SoccerClub, TimMcGuinness and family tweets. This seems like great tool for agencies and client service groups that have this requirement. See video.

@shakeshack – Whitney McNamara presented a nifty piece of code allows you to send a reply twitter that then gets fed back to all that account followers. He downplayed it as not a big deal, but this is exactly what I want to put into play for Newport Online. Later, he graciously pointed me to where I could find the code on his blog.

Botanicalls – I can’t say I want to get tweets from my plants, but now Botanicalls makes that possible. However when you have a brother-in-law with networking and soldering skills that is involved in a new landscaping project, something like this comes into play. See video.

To throw in a personal story, my first NYTM was in September 2007 when I jumped straight into the fire by presenting the new Hakia browser toolbar. Having never attended a meet-up since I was new to NYC, imagine how scared I was when the first presentation order came out and I was first on the list. Thankfully, by the time of the meeting came around I was down to the #6 slot. However, right before me, was one of the NYC start-up world elite, Kevin Ryan along with Henry Blogget, who were announcing the launch of Silicon Alley Insider. You might say that was a tough act to follow, but I survived.

Oddly, the next time I was on stage to present it was a two-person panel that I happened to share with Nate at a NY Social Media Club gathering. Nate had just done an all nighter to release his BricaBox project. That night for me was special because I was given special permission to keep my phone on since our baby was due later that week. Talk about a new launch that keeps you up all night 🙂 – Tim

SoccerClub – The Numbers of Social Networking

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SoccerClub.com

SoccerClub.com

I’ve had my SoccerClub.com site since 1997. It started as plain HTML, then I taught myself Active Server Pages and converted it to a more user generated site. Not to be confused with UGC circa 2009, but UGC 1997 with forums and emailing functionality.

Back in November, I transformed it to a social network using the Ning platform. Using only Ning’s out-of-the-box features, it was pretty easy to do, but still took about a month of configuring and tweaking. From there I sent out invitations to the email addresses that I had collected over the last 3 years. The result was a quick 300 members, and since then the membership has grown to 580. I am very excited about that my goal is to push it to 1000 by the end of February.

What I have learned is the same story that the mega-billionaires have learned – there’s no money in social networking if you use the old ad model. Comparing the last two Decembers show so much. The 2007 was a standard website vs the 2008 social network.

2007 Standard vs 2008 Social Network:

  • Page views are up +105%,
  • Click revenue down -60%, and
  • That makes eCPM is down -75%.