Internet Retailer reports “Several major multi-channel retailers, including eBay Inc., Shop NBC and the Home Shopping Network, have formed an alliance to develop strategies for dealing with legislative and technological issues facing web merchants.” FULL ARTICLE

I spoke with Barbara Tulipane, ERA President and CEO about this alliance while at the ERA annual conference in Las Vegas last month.  According to her, the “big boys” of the internet are tired of fighting, and seeking to work together to advance the cause of internet businesses in Washington, and in the eyes of consumers. 

I know what you’re thinking… “an infomercial association to spearhead the cause of internet companies?”

Perhaps it does make sense.  Let’s face it, when it comes to consumer trust, both the internet and the DRTV business could use a lift.  The bad apples in both arenas are making it tough for everyone.  In DRTV, we have hucksters and false advertisers.  Online, we have spammers, phishers, malware.  And on Capital Hill, pending and proposed legislation on everything from taxes to privacy could affect ALL of our businesses for years to come. 

Imagine the lobbying power of an association that had Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, and more all pulling for one cause. 

The Electronic Retailing Association could find itself as powerful as the NRA!

Your thoughts?

OK, so it’s not really BY Seth Godin.  The Big Moo is actually a compilation of 33 of the best business ideas from today’s top business leaders.  Excerpts are from the likes of Guy Kawasaki, Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters, Mark Cuban, and of course Seth Godin. 

There are two very cool things about the book:

#1 - None of the chapters are credited to their authors.  That’s right, each author contributed, but exactly WHAT they contributed is not made knows.  It’s actually kind of fun to try and figure out who wrote what!

#2 - 100% of the author royalties from the book are being donated to charity. 

Why should you check out The Big Moo?  If you’re not big into “business books”, The Big Moo fits the bill, as each chapter is a small, bite-sized morsel with a self contained lesson.  Perfect for busy people to read when you don’t have a lot of time.  There is some great advice on marketing, customer service and business that can be quite valuable.  On the other hand, if you are a business book junkie like me, but you forget most of the stuff you’ve read, then The Big Moo is a great reminder of lessons learned in the past, but stored away in your mind collecting cobwebs. 

The Big Moo hits bookstores on October 20th, 2005. 

On the heels of Commission Junction’s CJ University event and last week’s apparent, quiet ousting of notorious “bad actor” affiliate ShopatHomeSelect.com I thought it might be interesting to delve deeper into CJ’s network composition as described by itself.  This is of particular interest considering so much of my consulting business reveals so many advertisers continuing to (knowingly or un-knowingly) work with download-lovin’ ShopatHomeSelect.com.

As seen above, Commission Junction itself reports what it calls “Downloads” as representing a small yet significant portion of its publisher base (translation: to some degree, revenue base).  Also worth noting is that it separates out “Downloads” from “Loyalty” which may actually include players like ShopatHomeDirect given its cash-back (to consumers) business model… although largely distributed via downloads.  It is likely that other loyalty players (such as the Almighty uPromise.com and affiliates like MyPoints.com, eBates.com etc.) are similarly categorized as “Loyalty” although Commission Junction has not been very revealing about its categorization criteria.

It’s also important to note that CJ’s network of affiliates, or “publishers” as they call them, relies primarily on search… a service that they, themselves, and their competitors are rushing into (in effect, competing with their base of affiliates).  CJ competitor, Performics has been at this for years now and managed to take affiliate business away from CJ and Linkshare based on their ability to offer “more than affiliate programs.” I’ve written in the past on risks involved for affiliate networks that are dependent on search-based affiliates/publishers. 

Also, I’m interested to understand more about “Acquisition” affiliates as they would seem to be competing with and/or crossing over with other ValueClick holdings… specifically, CPA networks such as WebClients (acquired earlier this year).

We should be asking when (not if) RSS-powered technologies will be more widely adopted by advertisers considering Return Path’s recent study along with Lyris Technologies’ study... each citing large increases in “false positive filtering” of spam.  In other words, the verdict is out on e-mail delivery: users’ desired communications (i.e. from marketers and other trusted senders) is, increasingly, not getting delivered, rather is being categorized as “spam” or “bulk email.”

“Hotmail’s rate of “false positive filtering” increased from 5.6 percent in 2Q05 to 9.4 percent in the third quarter, and Gmail’s from 4.1 percent to 7.17 percent...”

and

“21 percent of permission-based emails did not reach the inbox during the first half of 2005 because they were either blocked or filtered into the junk folder, according to a new email deliverability study from Return Path.  Senders’ deliverability problems stemmed as much from their own practices (e.g., low list quality and number of complaints against the sender) as zealous blocking of emails by ISPs; blocking rates for individual mailers were as high as 54 percent.”

Jupiter Research received a fairly good dose of egg on its face when it published its widely criticized report on RSS earlier this year.  RSS adoption among marketers has been slow in coming yet RSS is no longer poised to explode… it’s exploding, being integrated into everything from browsers to major portals and is beginning to catch on among marketers in terms of adoption... outside of inserting ads into RSS streams.

Considering all of the email headaches, when will we see marketers move in large numbers to offer RSS-powered communication devices to their valued customers?  I, personally, envision devices wherein consumers willingly place icons on their desktop… doubleclicking to open an RSS-powered window that delivers and organizes order receipts, promotional offers and general communications with customers.  A loyalty device that sits directly on the desktop and is distributed via a viral campaign to tech-loving customers who find it “way cool.”

MarketingSherpa held a conference call today to discuss the initial results of their 2005 Search Engine Benchmark Guide.  You can download the slides from the presentation here. 

As to be expected from MarketingSherpa, some very enlightening things came from this briefing. Just a few key points:

Eyetracking - A compelling chart to show what people are looking at on the screen when on a search engine. (In this case, Yahoo) I was surprised at how LITTLE the paid links were viewed and clicked vs. the organic listings. Contrary to what the PPC search proponents would have you believe. Also interesting to see the pattern of what searchers look at (upper left), and what they actually click on (middle left).

Trademark use by affiliates - Clearly, the practice of letting affiliate utilize your trademarks is becoming much less common. 39% of merchants no longer allow affiliates to use trademarks, vs. 21% just eight months ago. (Slide has a misprint, purple bar should be January 05, not January 04)

SEO Agencies - One slide I had a hard time believing was the one that showed companies who launch an internal SEO strategy see a 38% lift in overall traffic, while companies who use an SEO agency see a 110% lift in traffic. Now keep in mind, agencies responded to the survey as well as marketers, so who knows how accurate this might be.  I’ve certainly never seen a 110% lift from any projects I’ve worked on where an SEO agency was brought in. Have you?

There was a lot more information contained in the slides, so I encourage you to check it out.

Googlewashing is a new term used to describe a growing practice by the Almighty search engine (among others).  In practical terms, it describes a cleansing process.  You’re probably thinking. “how did Google get dirty?” In fact, its index has gotten rather filthed up over the years as many… ranging from outsourced SEOs to marketing affiliates… have tried to “game” its search algorithm by making commercial information look like non-commercial information and other technical trickery.  It is critical for all marketers and publishers of original content to pay attention to this trend as early signs indicate that Google, itself, is having a difficult time keeping track of who to index and who to de-list/purge. 

The latest e-plague, in the eyes of search engines, is being dubbed “duplicate content.” Recently, Google has begun to scrub itself clean of this unwanted phenomenon; hence, the term “Googlewashing.”

Duplicate content is largely what it sounds like: information that has an original source but can be found in many other places.  Sound like plagiarism or “syndication gone wild?” For the most part you’re starting to understand the problem for search engines.  In the simplest of terms, “too much of one specific thing in too many places” makes it difficult to distinguish the original, (hence, “good” or “high quality") information from the stolen or regurgitated stuff. 

Who steals and/or regurgitates… and why?  Yes, affiliates of all sorts have been known to.  For simplicity’s sake, here’s the skinny:

1) Some Marketing Affiliates leverage data feeds provided to them by marketers (like you, perhaps).  Do the the contents of said data feeds look similar?  Most often they do… but do they look similar after your affiliates place them onto their Web pages?  This is the key question.  If they do look mostly similar you have, in effect, created your very own duplicate content machine - your affiliate program.

2) Some click-focused Contextual Advertising Affiliates (who make money from programs like Google AdSense or Overture ContentMatch) simply don’t have the time or energy to create their own original content… so they swipe it from somewhere else and slap it up on Web page(s).  Mixing some AdSense advertisements that are contextually-based on the fake/stolen content gives users something to click on and the affiliate a revenue stream.  But how do affiliates get users to the site?  Three letters: SEO and usually not the pretty kind.  As you can see, it’s easy to find.  Here is an example of a headline/article used rather liberally across numerous sites geared to garner ad clicks via “content.” Heck, there’s a whole get-rich-quick-for-doing-nothing industry out there that has sprung up and, so far, Google seems happy to play along.

So what harm is there in this?  That’s another debate entirely but in the eyes of search engines duplicate content is not desirable and is to be eliminated.  Do the good guys (the original sources of the content… i.e. advertisers) ever get mistaken as the bad guys (the “content” purveyors)?  You bet they do and would you believe me if I told you that one of Google’s own has gotten caught up in the mess?  Indeed, the search Goliath recently Googlewashed a blog belonging to one of its own employees.