Response to “Twitter And Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer”
Great guest post in TechCrunch by Steve Poland today on how Amazon is opening up affiliate channels for us to tweet and Facebook-status-update product recommendations for a cut of the revenue. Brilliant!
Guess what though – this had a name, and it was Beacon. And I’ve claimed in the past that Beacon was a game changing idea, executed poorly, because it didn’t cut the users in. Now Amazon is making the opposite a reality, cutting the users in but as of now excluding the platform. This is problematic for a couple reasons.
First, as Steve rightly claims, the affiliate rev share will go down due to the onslaught of millions of would-be affiliate marketers saturating supply. This is counterproductive to everybody: think about the value of a genuine “dude, you should buy this too” of your product from one friend to another. This is immensely valuable, and it’s something that no organized marketing channel can address as of now. The problem is, if you put tiny revenue incentives behind it, one needs to either blast his friends like crazy with SPAM all day or just not play the game. I suspect most individuals that marketers care about in any given campaign will just not play the game, and the SPAM industry will automate it as much as they can (as they’re already doing).
Second, and closely tied with my first point, without some mediation from the platform, this value is all but lost. Beacon did something interesting: it used your actual behavior (Paul just ordered Season 2 Disc 1 of Mad Men from Netflix) to influence your friends to do the same. Your friends see this once, and only once, from you, and its part of a one-time behavior that is actually an update relevant to what you’re doing at any given time (e.g. maybe one of your cute female friends wants to come over and watch it with you?) Essentially Netflix sponsored a direct conversation between you and your friends, and it was an informational one. This is not SPAM.
Compare this with “Hey I just ordered Mad Men you should get it to http:bit.ly/blahblahblah!” and suddenly you look like SPAM. See the difference? When the platform is able to be a part of the experience, it can mediate the relevancy of these messages to make the relationship actually valuable to marketers. And I bet Netflix is willing to pay a lot more to that kind of recommendation than the irrelevant blasts of affiliate marketing Amazon is sponsoring by allowing individuals to be affiliates.
Solution: Facebook & Twitter – bring Beacon back. But don’t be selfish and keep all the revenues for yourself. Share with the users that are actually creating the value. The alternative is here, and it’s going to ruin user experience, and you make no money from it. You decide.