Todd Tweedy on Affiliate Marketing At /Message

[Update: 11 July 2008 1:33pm ET — The affiliate marketing experiment for Andy Sernovitz at /Message has been terminated: see Andy Sernovitz On The End Of An Experiment]

Received email from an old colleague who I haven’t talked to in a long long time. He suggested that the ‘sponsored post’ that I wrote yesterday for Andy Sernovitz’s upcoming Word Of Mouth Marketing was, er, bullshit, so I thought I would clarify things a bit.

/Message has had advertising for a long time, and I intend to continue in that direction. I have recently begun bringing on other authors to broaden and deeper our coverage of the social revolution. I hope to continue the sort of influence /Message has had and to continue the growth we have seen over the past year: over 2000% growth in unique visitors over last June.

For that increase in attention, /Message needs to be a commercial entity, if only to offset the time being dedicated by me, and the other contributors.

In the past several years, /Message has structured affiliate relationships with various conferences, just as we have an affiliate agreement with Amazon. In many of these relationships, we offer people discounted attendance, with a discount code, and the discount code is used to track the number of registrations attributable to /Message. We receive a fee for each registration, just as we receive money from advertisers on clickthroughs. This is basic web marketing.

So just to clarify: yes, we are in a financial relationship with these conference companies. However, we only select conferences that we believe are of genuine interest, and that would provide real value to attendees.

Also, as part of the full disclosure, let me clarify that in many cases, the conference companies extent free attendance to authors at /Message, and in many cases, particularly when I am speaking, I receive speaking fees and am reimbursed for travel. This is the normal and usual case, but I am clarifying just so everything is open and transparent.

Here’s Todd’s email:

[via email]

Stowe,

Happy Thursday!

Spoiler Alert: I think the Sponsored Post is bullshit.

I haven’t been reading your blog for some time but what is up with the hidden sponsored post thing today? Honestly, if you’re going to make your “organic” content sponsored I think having a tag with sponsored post or some other label is needed if you are going to continue using :: sponsored post :: in a font size most people won’t see.

In fact, is your special code actually a revenue share framework? Don’t you think you should disclose that you are an affiliate and making revenue from an affiliate link? Auctioning off what brand or logo you wear is one thing but this post appears to be affiliate marketing. If it is, disclose it, please.

You’ve created great content with Corante, A Working Model and Message but your :: sponsored post :: format using an tiny font is bullshit.

Todd Tweedy

President & COO

BoldMouth Inc.

http://www.boldmouth.com

As a result of reflecting on Todd’s email, I have made the ‘:: sponsored post ::’ much more obvious, with a larger font and offset with two horizontal rules. I was simply reusing an existing CSS style without considering it too deeply. I agree with Todd that it should be much more obvious that a post is related to some financial relationship. I also added a ‘sponsored post’ tag, which I should have done if had been in my normal frame of mind (I have been at 50% all week with bronchitis). Basically, I wasn’t try to hide anything, but I have taken steps to make it much more obvious that there is a financial relationship in place.

By the way, Todd’s company, Boldmouth, is a word of mouth marketing consultancy, a competitor to Andy’s, I guess. And as Todd says, he hasn’t been reading /Message recently or commenting here, but this post got his attention, somehow.