"Just in time for Summer 2010, there's a new game you can play anywhere in the Gulf of Mexico. It's called "Dunk Tony Hayward into the oil spill." All you do is shove the BP CEO into the
crude sludge and try to measure his very, very modest impact on the environment." ~ Yasha Harari
Fresh Baked Goods
Laughzilla the Third (2012)
The Third Volume in the Funny Stuff Cartoon Book Collection Available Now.
Google today announced deeper integration between AdWords and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps. In short, you can now link your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts and enable auto-tagging.
By doing so, you can start receiving a new set of automatic detailed reports on things like day parts, destination URLs, and keyword positions. Google hopes this information will help advertisers make faster and better decisions about marketing their apps by showing how their search and display campaigns are performing and see what type of users are being driven to Google Play.
These new reports cover both display and search campaigns, letting you:
Check the Campaigns report to better understand users being driven into your app, and see how they use your app.
Find out from the Day Parts report when users are interacting with your campaigns.
Use Search reports to find out which keywords and search queries are acquiring the most new users.
“Ad campaigns should help you find the best customers,” Google Analytics for Apps Product Manager Rahul Oak explains. “These new reports go a long way towards identifying them. Whether you track in-app revenue or specific goal conversions, you’ll be able to tie user quality to the campaign that brought them to your app.”
Whether the reports work or not for everyone remains to be seen. That being said, it can’t hurt to try them out: if you use AdWords and Google Analytics, enable auto-tagging and Google says it will handle the rest. The new reports can be found “over the next few days” under the Acquisition menu for Google Analytics App Views.
I remember showing school essays to my dad growing up. He’s a really good writer and so getting his feedback before I turned a paper in usually helped me make some improvements.
But whenever I’d watch him reading over the pages, I would secretly be hoping he’d read it and say that everything is perfect. I obviously thought it was already perfect, otherwise I wouldn’t have shown it to him.
The truth is I didn’t really want any critical feedback. As a teenager trying to finish his homework, my only goal was to do the minimal amount of effort necessary to get a good grade and be done with it.
It was such a harmful way to think. And I’ve noticed that I have let it carry into my startup life as well. Often times, when I seek feedback on a project, it’s not actually constructive feedback that I want; it’s simply approval. I want a pat on the back and a “job well done.”
Of course, that doesn’t push me to work harder. It doesn’t provide me new perspectives. And it certainly doesn’t yield the best product.
I’ve noticed that most people have difficulty seeking constructive feedback. If you’re pretty good you can at least accept constructive feedback, but rarely will you actively seek it out. Often times you’ll still be plagued by that teenage desire to simply seek approval.
But when you meet someone who is hungry for tough feedback, the effect is powerful. You can just tell that they’re going to be successful because they are so hungry for information. Their pace of learning is so much quicker than anyone else who toils alone. They don’t take criticism of their work personally, and because of this, they exude a deep sense of confidence. I’m always inspired when I see that in its purest form.
But, if you’re someone that struggles with seeking out tough feedback here’s a little trick we use at 42Floors.
The Thirty Percent Feedback
It’s a trick I learned from our investor, Seth Lieberman. It came about because I once asked him for feedback on a product mockup, and he asked if I felt like I was ninety percent done or thirty percent done.
If I was ninety percent done, he would try to correct me on every little detail possible because otherwise a typo might make it into production. But if I had told him I was only thirty percent done, he would glaze over the tiny mistakes, knowing that I would correct them later. He would engage in broader conversations about what the product should be.
In this particular case, I was indeed ninety percent done and so we debated a few details, I got my pat on the back, and I moved on.
As he was leaving, he said:
“Next time come to me when you’re only thirty percent done and I’ll give you thirty percent feedback.”
So a few months later on a different project, I came to him with some questions on a project that was still in its early stages and we wrestled with the direction together. I didn’t polish anything and he made sure not to critique things he knew I would fix later. It was really freeing.
I knew I wasn’t putting my best foot forward and he didn’t care. He was able to help me shift course without the sunk cost of throwing away a ton of work.
We try to do a Thirty Percent Feedback sessions whenever we can in our office. It’s not easy though. Most people I find still want to wait until they’re ninety percent done. But that’s rarely optimal and usually involves painful rewrites.
If you want to get your team on board with Thirty Percent Feedback, it won’t be easy. Here are a few suggestions to help you get there:
Building the Thirty Percent Feedback into your culture
Lead by example
Duh. Don’t worry about anything else below if you can’t there.
Ask for it explicitly
You have to be deliberate because you’re fighting against an innate fear most people have: fear of rejection. Some of your best people are accustomed to being good at everything they do, so they may be the toughest to get on board.
You have to explicitly ask people to be on board with this concept.
Reward people with great feedback
Whenever someone comes to you for early feedback you have to reward it. If, even just once, you reject someone’s draft because it’s not polished enough for you, you’ll teach everyone else in the organization to always be 100 percent done before approaching you.
Execs at big companies may want everything perfect before it gets to them, but that’s no way to run a startup.
Praise speed
When someone takes way too long to get a first draft out because they’re being perfectionists and you praise them for their quality craftsmanship, it teaches everyone to do the same. You should, instead, praise people that move incredibly fast.
We always strive for one week. Even for the most complex projects, we try to see what can come out as a first draft within one week. From that point on, they can get feedback and start iterating.
Demo regularly
Set up the company for everyone to demo at your weekly meetings, regardless of what stage their project is in. It’s more of a show us whatever you have.
We used to be forced to demo every week. It was both daunting and humbling. But once we got used to it, we actually got addicted to the immediate feedback. That’s the culture you want.
One final note. Every once in awhile you’ll still have to give someone tough feedback when they thought they were 90 percent or 100 percent done. It always feel shitty to have throw away work.
But hopefully with this system, it will happen much less. And the result will not only be better products, but happier people.
In addition to including Microsoft account support in its Windows Phone app, Skype today also started letting new users signing up on Skype.com to register with a Microsoft account (in addition to a Facebook account). Here are the advantages of doing so, according to the Microsoft-owned company:
Less to remember with just one email address to sign in to Skype and your other services: just click on the Microsoft account button to sign in with your email address and password.
Enhanced password recovery experience, so you can now easily reset your password by receiving a security code sent by SMS or email.
Optional two-step verification to help keep your account more secure.
What Skype doesn’t mention, of course, is that if your Microsoft account is compromised, so is your Skype login. Turning on two-step verification, as noted in the third point above, is particularly important if you’re going use one account for multiple services.
Jochem Vroom is the co-founder and managing director of Imbull. He is currently working on the global couponing site Flipit, and has seven years of experience within the affiliate sector as a manager, blogger and speaker.
One of the biggest problems plaguing affiliate marketing today is that the industry attracts two very different types of clientele. Any major retailer or brand name worth their salt works with affiliates, but so do those “make money online” blogs, casinos and adult entertainment sites which are known for breaking almost every rule out there.
In order to maintain professionalism and success, the affiliate marketing industry must focus on engaging with quality businesses, shaking its seedy past and losing that problematic name. Here’s why:
Affiliate Marketing is a shitty name with an even dirtier reputation
Two years ago I was at an Emerce Performance Summit where a large travel advertiser was giving a presentation on their affiliate program. On one of his slides was a picture of the Beagle Boys, which he used to demonstrate to the crowd that affiliates are like villains.
The crowd chuckled at his joke, but I found myself growing angrier. Why do merchants think of affiliates in such a negative way? And why would a major brand that works with affiliates choose to show their partners in such a light?
The answer, I began to realize, is because that’s exactly how affiliate marketers are seen in the eyes of many advertisers. They don’t regard them as partners, but rather as money-hungry villains, cunning and willing to do whatever they can to leach off successful brands.
So how did this misconception come to be?
Affiliate marketing is often seen as fraudulent; luckily, this association is becoming a thing of the past, but the negative image is hard to shake completely.
FTC claims against affiliates frequently pop up in the news on a regular basis, further hurting the industry’s reputation.
A quick search for “Affiliate Marketing” takes you to one of those misleading e-book websites explaining how you too can become an online millionaire in two weeks by buying that stupid e-book for just $99.99. Yes, that’s technically a type of affiliate marketing, and unfortunately it’s the type the Web is flooded with.
Affiliate marketing is strongly connected to Last Cookie Counts, a thing many people think will soon change. Because of this, people associate affiliate marketing as an outdated model on its way out.
Rather than fight to change this, the affiliate marketing community should adapt to the needs of their advertisers on this matter. It’s time to provide a solution.
What do you think about when you hear the word “Affiliates”? High quality fashion portals with a huge reach? Or do you think about smart whiz kids making money off of scammy gambling programs?
Performance (Based) Marketing is the first step of the solution
For all the networks out there aiming for quality and reputation over easy money: Get rid of the “affiliate marketing” name. Ban it, kill it, get rid of those negative associations, and while you’re at it, also ditch that stupid “make money online” sentence in your slogans.
It’s the old way of doing performance-based business, and too often affiliates send this message to publishers while selling their business as being of high quality to clients and consumers. They know this already – it’s time to move on to a broader view.
The differences in association between “affiliate” and “publisher” are already prevalent:
Affiliates are those making money off Facebook ads, casino programs, and weight loss pills. Affiliates are smart, technologically-savvy, and the types to invest in their own cars.
Publishers are the portals that build up brands and foster long-term relationships for advertisers. Publishers invest money in their portals and products. They don’t own a car and they will sell their business after 10 years to an old, slow media company.
It’s time to make the switch to Performance Marketing. It’s what advertisers understand, and that’s what the people on the broad level want to talk about.
These days, no serious publisher, website, or portal wants to be labeled an “affiliate,” so why is it that we still communicate this on all the corporate websites? Why are we still going to “affiliate events”? The name Performance Marketing is much broader than Affiliate Marketing, since it also covers the up-and-coming display and retargeting market, and demonstrates the added value the sector brings.
However, we still need a quality barrier
A simple change of name is not enough to make the kinds of changes that need to be made. Why on earth is it still free to join an affiliate network? Why can a spammy affiliate easily get into a program that represents the world’s largest brands?
It doesn’t make sense. If you are telling the world that you are a high quality affiliate performance network, why not live by those rules? Why not build up quality through a barrier separating scammy try-outs from professional publishers who wish to join the best programs? Isn’t that what advertisers want: Quality?
There are already a few networks with money barriers in place. At Affiliate Window in the UK, you have to pay 5 pounds just to join, which you can get back after your initial turnover. So why not raise the price to 100 pounds, which you get back once you’ve reached the same amount in sales?
Or, why not make a barrier that prevents people from joining every program so that a publishers is forced to really take their time on their programs and provide only the top quality offers. What’s the problem with raising the barrier for starting out?
So in the end…
Networks should get rid of the old affiliate-related names, not just internally but externally as well. Tell people that you are not an affiliate business anymore, and quit sponsoring affiliate events that are not of value to big brands or performance-based marketing.
Become a performance hub instead of a simple LCC tracking network. Move far away from the affiliate-related problems that are unrelated to the core business of quality networks.
If the networks do this the right way, they would be able to move up the chain and once again serve as the performance hub for advertisers. In the end, the networks would be able to provide additional services (such as working attribution, display and retargeting) under this new name.
Square today announced it has acquired scheduling and appointment booking startup BookFresh. Both companies are promising that for BookFresh customers, nothing will change: the product will continue to be updated and supported.
For those who have never heard of it, BookFresh’s software helps local sellers create a self-service appointment booking experience. Square and BookFresh say them have the same goal: giving time back to sellers so they can focus on their business. As such, the two have decided to team up and pool their resources.
Interestingly, BookFresh’s FAQ suggests that Square hasn’t quite figured out how to integrate the two products. This is likely to change, but there’s no timeline for such a move:
Will BookFresh and Square products work with each other? When?
The products will operate separately for the time being. If you’re interested in using Square to accept payments, you can sign up at square.com.
Will I be able to access my BookFresh data in Square dashboard and vice versa?
For the time being, your BookFresh data and Square data will be separate.
Like every acquisition, however, this is not a random purchase. Square is increasingly positioning itself as more than just a platform for accepting payments. In fact, the company already emphasizes that its customers manage their point of sale with Square Register, run loyalty programs and promotions for customers, and use analytics to make better business decisions.
Scheduling and appointment booking makes sense as the next step. Square wants to be more than just a single tool: it wants to be a whole toolbox for helping sellers grow their business.