Marketing Pilgrim

If you’re an affiliate marketer, 2009 doesn’t hold much growth for you, but Forrester predicts a healthy rise in spending after that–through 2014. In fact, US affiliate marketing spend will increase to $4 billion over that 5 year stretch, realizing a very healthy 16% growth rate.

However, if you’re hoping Facebook, Twitter, and others social networks will be your secret to success, you may wish to think again.

Sixty-two percent of US online buyers use social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace.com for communicating and keeping up with friends. Only 2% of US online buyers have purchased products through social networking sites. Affiliate sites get paid based on transactions they drive, not simply click-throughs. Thus, affiliate sites currently experimenting with social networks may be getting traffic from these sites, but they are sending very few qualified leads to marketers. Little money will therefore change hands in this scenario.

What is probably most ironic about the story that you are about to read is the fact that a journalistic icon, the Washington Post, is trying to maintain control of its staff while it can’t even keep an internal memo from going public. Having made that observation from the start you can see that this is not going to get any better for them.

The information that has hit the media stream is the social media guidelines that have been imposed on the staffers of the Washington Post as the newspaper tries to hold on to some shred of integrity in the new world order. paidContent.org has ‘received’ a copy of the entire directive. Some highlights:

Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the film classic The Wizard of Oz. One of my favorite parts of the movie is when Dorothy discovers the true identity of the Wizard. This scene is symbolic of many political and social truths in our society.

Coincidentally, we saw this same scene play out in the Internet marketing industry this week. On Wednesday, Seth Godin, launched Brands in Public. In short the program aggregates mentions of brands from different social media sites to a single page on Godin’s Squidoo. While Godin claims that he consulted many brand managers about this idea and they all supported it, there was a barrage of criticism from folks in the Internet marketing industry. Most of the criticism drew attention to the fact that Godin himself has been a champion of transparent marketing tactics such as “permission based marketing” however, this program seeks to leverage the hard work of other brand builders with out their permission.

If we can believe Hitwise, we’ve all hit a Twitter slump:

Of course, this could just mean that we’re all switching from the web interface to desktop and mobile applications, but surely if Twitter were adding new users, they’d start with the web site, right?

Hmm. Maybe there’s a slump in those seeking out Twitter too!

What are your thoughts?

If you’re not familiar with DailyBooth.com, the best way to describe it is it’s like Twitter, but with snapshots of your face. Yeah I know, sounds lame, right?

Except that I can help but laugh out loud every time Dream Systems Media owner Matt Siltala posts his latest mugshot to DailyBooth–which he then feeds to his Twitter stream. In fact, so strange/funny/bizarre/scary are Matt’s expressions, that I asked him to provide one for a caption contest.

Here it is:

So, if you’re up for winning a $25 iTunes gift card, simply provide a caption for the above photo. You can leave a comment below–or at Matt’s DailyBooth page. Either way, you have until 9pm ET today to provide a funny–and clean–caption. Matt will then pick his favorite as the winner.

It’s always nice to see Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer actually sitting on a chair, as opposed to throwing one.

In this video, he chats with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington about a host of Microsoft initiatives. Mid-way through, he discusses search…

…the UI, the approach, the algorithms have changed less in the last five years, then more … so I think if you look out the next 10 years we’re going to see more innovation in search. And, of course, that’ll be best served by good competition in the market and, y’know, at this stage, hopefully with the government approval of our deal with Yahoo, the good competition better come from us. Otherwise I don’t think we’ll see some of that innovation.