Don’t believe everything you read in this wonderful arena called the social internet.

Something I’ve noticed across multiple social networking sites is that a majority (not all) affiliate marketers will either lie or stretch the truth to get you to become part of their scheme. Every single one of them claims to be “the next big thing” on the internet and by getting in now you’ll make millions. The problem with that is all these big things are old things with some spit and a quick shine.

The truth is that there are a lot of ways to make money online:

• Legitimate business sales
• Product sales
• Ad revenue
• Paid blogging

The catch is that all these things require a special secret ingredient that MLMs and affiliate marketers seem to forget, originality.

Here is a classic example of what an affiliate marketer will do to make money.

1. Sign up to a site.
2. Create affiliate links to their ‘product’ or ‘ service’
3. Spam their links and propaganda
4. Deny doing any of this

What happens is they get a small percentage of the profit made off of that product or service if you buy it.

*Disclaimer* Affiliate marketing itself is not bad at all and in fact can be a great way to make an extra buck. It’s the ‘marketers’ that give it a bad name through their slimey methods and they’re spoiling the web with it.

Here is another example of an affiliate marketer, basically being stupid.

Inside Affiliate Marketing Says:

Hey nice blog my friend. Affiliate marketing is the fastest growing business in world. However its not that easy as it looks. Obviously you need advanced knowledge about affiliate marketing. If you are dead and broke , you can learn most of the startup tricks via marketing forums.

I’m sorry but I couldn’t have said it better myself. This was a comment on my previous post about affiliate marketing, which if they had actually read they would have seen it was speaking against affiliate marketing.

So here’s my nugget of gold for the day. Breath it in, swirl it around a bit, maybe gargle, and spit back out into a ceramic pot to keep for later usage. Social media is THE tool to meet people of like minds from all over the world and communicate in real time. That is all.

I’ve talked about variable video and personalized video a little in the past. Now let’s look at some more examples and break down some of their components.

Here are some examples:

• Inspiring Escapes
• Dexter
• Haunted house
• Walts wisdom
• Carmen has a crush on you
• News3Online

There are 4 main effects that can be achieved in a variable video:

• Variable text - example: holding up a card with the persons name
• Variable image - example: holding up a picture of the person
• Variable audio - example: saying the persons name with actors face covered
• Variable video scenes - example: saying the persons name without actors face covered

If you wanted to create a variable video campaign, there are multiple ways to go about it. All of the above effects can be recreated using Adobe Flash. If you only plan on doing variable text and/or imaging in the video you may not need 3rd party software. If you do wish to integrate your variable video campaign with other software, XMPie recently announced video integration capabilities with their system.

Another important aspect of variable video is the story. To properly recreate any of the videos shown in this post you would need actors, sets, equipment, scripts, etc. But, one great thing about variable video is it’s surprise factor. You could get away with crappy quality video as long as the personalization tied in seamlessly.

The most important part of any variable video campaign is it’s final conversion screen. This is where you encourage personalizing the video for someone else. Someone the user believes will find the video entertaining. People love seeing their name in lights and now everyone can be part of the internet video phenomenon.

Contact Magicomm to learn more about variable video.

So with the launch of TwitterAdder and Twitter Adder for Firefox everyone is in a stir talking about how there is finally an easy way to add friends. What do I think of this new awesome service, um, not so awesome. I feel as if it kind of defeats the purpose of Twitter and if people are looking to it as a launching point for their new account, they will be more likely to bail on Twitter.

First off, for those of you who have seen my own Twitter Adder, let it be known that I am not a hypocrite. My reasoning is that I believe Twitter is a powerful tool for connecting with like minded individuals. This is why my own Twitter Adders only add friends within the industry of your choice. So far I’ve covered 3 industries and 1 age group (which is private to 20SB members).

My favorite pitch when describing Twitter to social media newbies is that it instantly connects you to individuals of similar industries, trains of thought, and locations. If TwitterAdder becomes their premiere source of obtaining friends I believe they will lose interest in Twitter fast as 6 of their new found friends speak a different language and the other 4 never use their account.

Conclusion

I think TwitterPack and TwitterLocal are the best sources for finding new friends. The future of Twitter adders should specialize in specific demographics. I chose my microblogs like my regular blogs, quality over quantity.

The following is a quick flash application i wrote to help people quickly connect to like minded individuals. This is the first version and i will add further functionality later (adding yourself if your not on the list). I obtained these lists from twitterpacks

No passwords or usernames are saved during this process however if you’re concerned, I recommend you switch your password now, use the tool, and then switch it back to your old password.

If the tool does not work please notify me or try again later.

(Note: The app takes awhile to add everyone so you may want to let it run until your status bar says done)

You can find a similar tool by seocracy at http://www.seocracy.com/fun

So what is Plaxo?

Here is my spin on Plaxos own definition …

Plaxo is a lot of things. It’s mostly about synchronizing most of the things that you and your connections do all across the web in a single place without you having to worry about any of it. It’s also about staying in touch with friends, colleagues and family on a daily basis. It’s a place on the web where you can look and see what photos that random guy posted on Picasa, while finding out that Tom blogged about how he just found a ‘one of a kind offer for a sweet vacation’, and seeing that your co-worker changed his status again from ‘working’ to ‘eating’. Now with Pulse, Plaxo has become a fun and efficient way to communicate with all of your friends, family and business contacts.

Now let me set the record straight here and now, I <3 Plaxo. I said it, it’s true. It’s the one social network I feel has really nailed down the most effective means of communications that encourage conversation and minimize useless banter.

Plaxo’s Pulse is broken down into 12 types of content of which 6 can be posted right from within Plaxo (the other 6 are updated via RSS and APIs). The most powerful of these types of content are Messages, Links and Polls. Some of my favorite conversations on Plaxo have been through comments on Polls.

Now what sets Plaxo apart from the rest?

It’s community. In a Poll I posted recently I believe Leanne Watson says it best:

it’s good because the topics are about business but include a personal aspect, if that makes sense? I’ve learnt things and I’ve made some connections that seem like friendships as well. The hard part is maintaining a presence when reality gets very busy.

The truth is that this community seems to be a very honest group of people. It’s no secret that we’re all here to network and promote our services, however we are more likely to work with those we trust. Bob Thomason noted:

We enjoy buying from people we know and trust. I know I do. We buy that way with ‘brick and mortar’ businesses, so, why not here.

Isn’t there spam?

Of course there is, however it is controllable. There is a large portion of the community pushing their Affiliate Links on to Pulse but you can always filter out the annoying ones. To be honest, I’ve filtered out so many of them at this point that my Pulse is pretty jam packed with some quality posts about topics I am quite interested in.

Anything Else?

Actually, ya. Everything I’ve described thus far as solely part of Plaxo’s ‘Pulse’ feature. There is also a centralized rolodex system, calendars, ecards and alot more.

So finally, please check it out and drop me a line.

In case Twitter wasn’t taking up enough of your time, there is a new guy on the block, all blinged out in Ajax, looking for a little attention. I have to say, Plurk is a pretty cool Twitter clone. It allows all of the basic features of Twitter and then its spiced up a bit.

Status Updates

Plurk’s status updates are a little smaller than Twitters and at times a little hard to read. However they do pack a little extra punch with a comment system as well as qualifiers.

Plurk(top) and Twitter(Bottom)

Twitter’s reply button sometimes just does not cut it and the more I’ve been using FriendFeed and Plurk, the more I long for such a feature. The qualifier button is also pretty dam cool. Its kind of like Twistori however it’s built into the system and you can use it to sort friends’ posts based on the qualifier.

Comment System

So now a little bit more about my favorite function of Plurk, its comment system. Its very similar to FriendFeeds comment system in that you can comment on specific status updates.

The number to the right of a post tells you how many comments that post has.

This definitely encourages more conversation as replys tend to get lost in Twitter (especially if your not using a 3rd party app). Plurk also seems very speedy in notifying you of new comments and posts.

Plurk’s Comment System

I guess you could compare it to a mini chat rather than a comment system since everything is happening in real time.

So what do I not like about Plurk?

Well besides the goofy name, I’d have to say that in the end, at least for me, simplicity wins the game. That’s why i chose Google over Yahoo and then Dreamweaver over Frontpage. But complexity aside it might be too early in the game to make an honest call on the matter. Twitter’s API makes up for what it lacks in built in features as the community is constantly pushing its boundaries (and its servers). I also found it very easy to make friends in Twitter where as in Plurk I am still at a loss. The friends I have currently are my friends from Twitter :).

Conclusion

Plurk

• Awesome comment system
• Nifty graphics
• Filtering by qualifiers

Twitter

• Simplistic
• More customization capabilities
• API

I would say that, at least for the moment, I am going to stick with Twitter because of the large amount of 3rd party apps and my cool customized home page. Plus I’d hate to have to start all over again making new friends.

Follow me on Twitter

Follow me on Plurk

If you haven’t noticed, I just switched from Blogger to WordPress about a week ago. Both are excellent services however I do enjoy WordPress a lot more now that I am finally using it. Now let me break down what I’ve found.

Blogger

Blogger was a great, easy to set up service.

All of my posts were automatically included in Google’s Blog Search as well as it’s organic results. Adding new templates was very easy to do and the XML templates allow a lot of flexibility. I also received a good amount of traffic from people just browsing the Blogger blogs.

WordPress

WordPress is also pretty great. It does require a few extra steps to get started but everything is very well documented.

My favorite part about WordPress is all of the plugins that are available. There were a few problems I ran into with my Blogger blog that were easily solved with my WordPress blog; like displaying code and filtering spam. Another great thing is the WYSIWYG. Blogger’s WYSIWYG was very glitchy for me and I did not like how it formated everything. WordPress also provides you with a pinging service which, once set up, provides greater indexing capabilities than blogger.

So which one is better?

It depends on your level of experience blogging and your knowledge about web technologies. Blogger is easier to use and setup and if you have a GMail account, your already half way there. You can also personalize the URL and it gives very detailed instructions to do this. However, if you have your own web host and domain name I would go with WordPress. It isn’t to hard too set up and in the long run it has a lot more features to play with.

About two weeks back I posted a survey “Why do you or don’t you use Twitter?”. It was interesting to see how people responded.

Why Plaxo users Tweet

(Percents represent the percentage of Plaxo users who do use Twitter)

Continue Reading…

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had the privilege of working on a cross media marketing campaign for Canon Europe. In true ‘I can do anything’ fashion, we at Magicomm decided to throw everything we had into it. The campaign is going to be showcased in the Canon booth at Drupa.

I’m not only excited about this campaign because of the client, but what we did in the campaign itself. It’s basically your standard PURL, kinda like the one we did for Magicomm, however we’ve simplified and viralized the whole microsite. I’ve been talking alot about interactive video in the past couple weeks and the potential it has as a marketing medium. Now I finally get to put my theory to the test as the last page of the PURL features its very own interactive/personalized video.

The PURL will go live in Drupa mid next week and we’ll have it live for the public a couple days after that. Be sure to check back to see how the campaign is doing as well as learn a little more about how effective it actually was.

Everything you need to know about Twitter in as short of a post as possible.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. - From Wikipedia

Commoncraft also has a pretty good explanation of what twitter is on youtube.

Here are some Twinterviews about what people love about twitter.

Who do I follow?

First thing you can do is invite all of your friends through Twitters Find & Follow page. Once that is done you can move on to websites like Who Should I Follow, Twittersearch and Twubble. (More Twitter Search Engines)

There are also lists you can scan through at TwitterPack and Twitterholic as well as some Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter.

It is probably a good idea to view a users Twitter page before you follow them to be sure they aren’t spam.

How do i update?

There are A LOT of ways to update your twitter status. The most obvious (and sometimes most reliable) is the Twitter site itself.

There is also an array of third-party apps to help feed your twitter hunger:

• TwitterFox
• Twhirl
• Twitterrific
• Snitter
• Twitkit

Or you can automate the process with TwitterFeed.

Where else can i put my twitter feed?

You can view your feed in any feed aggregator (Google Reader, FriendFeed, Outlook, etc). Your feed can be accessed at

• http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.rss - Your Feed
• http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/username.rss - Your Friends Feed

as well as by clicking the RSS button at the bottom of your Twitter page.

Another popular thing to do is add your Twitter feed to facebook. Twitter has its own Facebok App or you can just sync your facebook satus with Twitter. I personally chose to use FriendFeed because it was the least intrusive.

What are some cool apps I can use?

Check out the Twitter Fan Wiki Apps Page.

I hope someone found this informative. Please feel free to follow me: @spazcer