We’ve just launched an information product marketing division at Personal Life Media. We now need an affiliate marketing expert to help us sign up and manage affiliates and JV’s. We have four products launched and another dozen in the pipeline. If you understand the affiliate and JV world and want to work for a great company that provides life-transforming products, check out this role.

The sky is the limit as to where this can lead, but to start, we need a detail-oriented, super-friendly sales person who loves to enroll people in great new ideas.

You get to work with me one-on-one, account by account and I will teach you all I know about sales, marketing and business development in addition to publishing and information product marketing while we co-create successful relationships with partners.

You can live anywhere in the world, but your English must be perfect, your grammar excellent, your writing skills warm and powerful and your commitment to your responsibilities resolute.

Team PLM!

Affiliate Marketing Manager : Full Time : Contract : Base + Commission

We are seeking a self starter with a demonstrated ability to run a successful affiliate marketing program. You must be able to identify, recruit, motivate and retain successful affiliates.

Duties

Create affiliate marketing materials for products including sample blog posts and sample emails for affiliates.

Create affiliate marketing campaigns and promotions to motivate affiliates.

Identify and recruit top affiliates for each product including JV partners and publishers.

Upload and manage banner ads and affiliate assets into our affiliate marketing network site, RevShareNow.com

Manage JV launches and ongoing affiliate relationships.

Communicate weekly with affiliates to keep them informed about new Personal Life Media products, new promotional tools, upcoming promotions, and recommended best practices for promoting the various Personal Life Media products.

Monitor affiliate activities and insure compliance with company policies. Verify affiliate payment amounts and approve affiliate payments.

Conduct surveys of customer prospects to understand buying behavior and make recommendations for improving conversion rates.

Manage auto-responders and track conversion statistics from email campaigns.

Create training materials such as tutorials, FAQs, and demo videos for affiliates.

Analyze metrics such as click through rates, conversion rates, commissions per sales, total cost of sales and commission per impression and make recommendations for improving ROI on program as well as products, landing pages, and affiliate promotional materials.

Requirements
3 – 5 years managing affiliate programs
Bachelor’s degree
Excellent communications skills, both written and verbal
Fluent in English
Very reliable broadband connection
Direct experience with affiliate software such as Post Affiliate Pro preferred.

About Personal Life Media
Personal Life Media (PersonalLifeMedia.com) is a multimedia lifestyle brand producing digitally downloadable content. The company publishes 40 weekly audio shows (podcasts) and companion blogs and is an eBook publisher of direct-to-consumer online information products targeted to consumers interested in personal and professional growth.
PLM provides a technology infrastructure of automated platforms for podcast and information product publishing to serve experts who deliver motivational programs, talk shows, virtual workshops, downloadable training systems and support programs via blogs, audio, video and eBooks.

The currently available titles include:
Talk Show Tips – 72 Show Host Secrets

Naturally Slender Quick Start – Hypnosis for Weight Loss

Speak Up With Power and Influence – Achieve More Confidence
Expand Her Orgasm Tonight – 21 day Program for Partners

Qualified individuals may send their resume to “jobs at personallifemedia dot com”.

Having known and worked with Susan Bratton for nearly ten years and I can not endorse her highly enough. Susan is incredibly bright and polished, but she’s also is fun to work with and always on the cutting edge of marketing and technology. Susan is and incredible mentor and partner. She fosters an amazing atmosphere that’s full of energy and creativity. I highly recommend working with Susan! – Heidi Kadison, former employee, Excite@Home

I wanted to write a quick note to let you know that it was a pleasure working for you while at Excite@Home.  You are one of the most strategic and eloquent leaders I have met and consider you to be my most influential mentor.  You can move mountains with your words and build powerful teams with your management acumen.  One of the most connected people in the industry, I welcome any opportunity to work with and/or for you in the future. — Brendan O’Brien, VP & GM, Digital Media Group, ISM Entertainment

Kyra Reed, Markyr

Conversation ranges from Bing to GoogleWave to Hashtags to TweetCrawls. Then we get into social influence marketing strategy and creating a solid, active community site.

Then things get dishy as Suz and Kyra talk about men with presence and why that’s the sexiest attribute a man can have. Don’t you love how the show combines humanity and marketing business advice all in a 30 minute treat?

Kyra Reed, Markyr on Community Development, Integrated Microcosms, Tweet Reach

Similar to the concept of behavioral targeting, marketers and researchers believe that if they target the friends of an existing customer, they will find “birds of a feather” prospects for their goods.

There are a number of companies using social graph data including Lookery (my interview with Scott Rafer, CEO), Media6Degrees and UNBOUND Technologies . These data mining and ad targeting companies are leveraging your data: the things you “fan” on Facebook,  your personal profile information, your network of connected friends (and god knows what else!) to find new prospective consumers connected socially to you so they can market products to your friends if you are a customer.

UNBOUND Technolgies can take a marketer’s existing customer list, compare it to their database of all known LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users and come up with a rank order list of who, among their existing customers, are the most influential. If a brand has a Facebook “Page” (Fan Page), they can map the most to least influential fans, based on number of social connections.

Here’s an article from Business Week that gives you some idea of how important this data mining of social graphs is to the social net companies and marketers.

Learning and Profiting from Online Friendships

These next two images are very telling. These are my Affiinty Map and my Influencer List from UNBOUND Technologies.

First you can see, of my 3,200 Facebook friends, what the top Celebrities/Public Figures, Brands, Bands, Services et cetera are of the people to whom I’m most connected.

If I were a brand (I’m certainly trying to be!) doing co-marketing promotions, it would be brilliant to partner with Guy or Seth or Arianna or the IAB or 212 in NY.  My friends and friendsters (virtual friends) would be more likely to pay attention to my messaging if I were to co-create something with other public figures, associations or brands about which they care most.

In this list from UNBOUND Technologies, you can see who in my network are the most influential. If Joe Jaffe, Charlene Li or Mike Webb were to promote DishyMix, for example, their followers would be most likely to be interested in my work and they have the biggest reach.

If I give Unbound Technologies my professional contact database, they can also match it up with the premier social networks to give me an even better rank order of those people I know who are most connected in the social sphere. Even if I’m not directly connected to them now, I’d know who I should approach to friend to continue to widen my network more proactively.

Just replace Susan Bratton with your brand and think of the efficiencies and implications. What comes to your mind?

And here is this week’s DishyMix. Perfectly timed to talk about Social Influence Marketing with Shiv Singh of Razorfish who has been thinking about social network theory since grad school at the London  School of Economics & Political Science.

Shiv Singh, Razorfish on the Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

Bernie’s Show       Bernie’s Blog        Find and Convert in iTunes

He asked me a number of questions in advance of the interview and I thought I’d blog the answers here.

Who is Susan Bratton and what does she have her hands in now?

I’m a CEO, Publisher, Blogger, Podcaster, Speaker and Author.

DishyMix is my weekly podcast and companion blog. My coverages ranges from brain science to new gadgets to landing page conversion to the future of the social graph.

I’m the CEO and co-founder of Personal Life Media, an aspirational company and next-generation publisher focused on providing virtual, fully downloadable content experiences.

Our mantra is “frank talk and deep discussion for your personal life.”

We publish 40 podcasts, companion blogs and are launching 15 new information products I call “ebooks with benefits.”

Our first info products to market are, Talk Show Tips, Speak Up with Power and Influence, Masterful Techniques to Overcome Anxiety and Fear, Naturally Slender Quickstart and a 21 Day Lovemaking Program for Couples. We have another 10+ info products in production.

Top shows on Personal Life Media include:
DishyMix, Inside Out Weight Loss, Expanded Lovemaking, Buddhist Geeks, Living Dialogues, 3 Digital Photography Shows, The Diva Cast, The New Man, Just for Women, Philosopher’s Notes, Tantra & Kama Sutra and Sex, Love & Intimacy.

What is my high level view of social media marketing?

I view social media as being in three categories, Listening, Appvertising and Participation. Shiv Singh of Razorfish really helped me gel my concept of these buckets and his DishyMix interview is coming in June.

Listening is getting the most traction with Participation second and Appvertising third.

Listening: New companies like Unbound Technologies, a next generation Neilsen Buzz Metrics, is focused on opportunities around the social graph and social influence marketing. They create a list of the most influential individuals for any given brand and then provide an “affinity map” of the other most-influential people and brands related to that single, key influencer. This is fantastic for outreach, prioritization of influencers and joint promotions to important clustered audiences.

Taking behaviorial targeting to a new high with the inclusion of social graphing is Media6Degrees. They offer ad targeted based on social graphing. I also need an update on Lookery who is aggregating social media data across social networks to use for ad targeting. My interview with Scott Rafer of Lookery is here.

Appvertising is being well handled by ClearSpring, Gigya and RockYou! as well as SocialMedia.com and ContextOptional. Brands who create useful aps or sponsor useful aps for their target consumers are brilliant players at a high-level of sophistication in the social influence marketing sphere.

Participation is certainly evident in Facebook Pages. Here’s my DishyMix Fan Club where I give away all kinds of goodies to my listeners.  Also popular and smart are consumer generated content experiences like HP on YouTube described here in my interview with Daina Middleton and the darling of the moment, corporate Twitter accounts like this one.
What is the biggest difficulty in Social Media Marketing?

I believe in larger organizations, it is around internal ownership. Should social marketing be part of marketing, corp comm, where? In smaller organizations, I see the problem being one of overwhelming choice. Where do I start as a small business with limited resources?

Also, tracking and ROI still being figured out. Here is a great presentation on social media ROI.
http://www.slideshare.net/yongfook/social-media-roi

Lee Odden (the wonderful soul who connected Bernie and I in the first place through his superlative Top Rank Online Marketing Blog  and I talk about integration of web analytics and social media analytics in this interview I did with Lee at SXSW for the #Community Powered project. Emphasis on real time data. The data that you can collect through something like a social media monitoring tool, like Buzz Logic, Collective Intellect, Radian6, married with web analytics, like Google Analytics, Omniture, Web Trends.

Lee Odden and Susan Bratton on Web and Social Media Analytics

Podcasting? How did you get into it? What is the current state of podcasting and consulting your crystal ball on podcasting’s future.

Podcasting is still a nascent market.

The beauty of it is that anyone can create an audience of raving fans. (and in my ebook with benefits, called Talk Show Tips, I teach you how to empower your raving fans with the tools they need to help you grow your audience.)

If you are articulate and like to talk more than you like to write, audio may be better for you than blogging. And with transcripts, you can have the best of both worlds.

For video, the bar is very high on production quality. Make sure you are adequately resourced before pursuing.

Commercial podcasting is a very smart solution for brands who have deep knowledge to share with their customers and prospects.

The ADM (Association for Downloadable Media) is working on ad models, audience measurement and consumer attitudes toward sponsorships of podcasts.

It’s a greenfield opportunity for sponsors. Integrated social media programs are key. You must leverage the hosts’ social media influence.

There are two excellent video clips on Volomedia’s blog about Podcasting Metrics and Podcast Advertising and Sponsorship that Jeff Karnes and I just presented at the eMetrics Summit.

My presentation is at Slideshare.com about some of my best programs from TrustedID, Holosync’s MeditateFree.com, Better Sex Institute, Lensbaby, Accuquote and Audible.

http://www.volomedia.com/blog/2009/05/shows-on-the-go-with-jeff-karn.php

http://www.slideshare.net/SusanBratton/podcasting-metrics-and-sponsorship-ideas

Finally, Talk Show Tips: 72 Secret ‘Master Host’ Techniques will teach anyone how to land big name guests, prepare for their show, ask killer questions with my easy question-generator mini-course, create and manage a facile show flow, conduct professional in-interview techniques and learn a dozen ideas for using social media to radiate your show and help your fans promote your show for you.

What is your DishyMix podcast and blog business model?

I’m very fortunate to have sponsors who underwrite my show to reach my valuable, sophisticated audience of marketers, agency pros and digital media mavens. DishyMix is sponsored by Isobar US Carat, the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits, adtech conferences, Trusted ID, Upstream Habitat and Audible.

Who are some of the most memorable guests on DishyMix?

I’ve created a blog post to wrap up my Top 10 Favorite DishyMix Guests.

DishyMix: Success Secrets from Famous Media and Internet Business Executives

And Coming Soon! Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock on his newest tome, Revolutionary Wealth and Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone on his newest angle, Who’s Got Your Back?

Without a doubt, this list of amazing human beings are my all time favorite guests. The interviews are delightful, inspiring, educational and entertaining:

Sir Ken Robinson on The Element, Talent Assessment and Feeling Lucky

Dacher Keltner, Born to Be Good, Your Jen Ratio and Cro-Magnon CEO’s

Lynda Resnick on Predicting Winning Products, Outliers and Rubies and Cuties

David Szetela and the PPC 10 Cylinder Engine

Nolan Bushnell, 20 Start Ups Later, on Chemical Engines, Existentialism and “My Cave.”

WOZ Steve Wozniak, Apple Computer on Inventing as Art, Philanthropy and the Spirit of Creativity Part 1 of 2

Marcus Buckingham on The Truth About You, Career Intervention on Oprah and the Strength’s Revolution

John Zogby, Preeminent Pollster on The American Dream, Retail Politics and the Value Chasm

Alex Bogusky of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky on Culture Jamming, Hermie the Pygmy Elephant and Telling the Subservient Chicken to Go “Pluck” Himself

John Battelle on The Conversation Economy, Hairy World Issues and High School Musicals Part 1 of 2.

A FoxNews.com story entitled:

Are You a Twit If You Don’t Want to Twitter?

stated, “a recent survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 45 percent of Americans in all age groups are enthusiastic about socializing via computer and mobile devices. Meanwhile, 48 percent are indifferent to Internet social networks, overwhelmed by gadgets or often avoiding Internet use altogether.”

The other side of the enthusiastic adoption of social media is the large group of people who have actively opted-out or who aren’t even interested in leveraging social networks online.

Though this Fox article reviews social media fatigue, when I look at the @Plan Profiling Report index numbers for Gen Y (18-24), I see that they index at 473 for”Publishing/Updating Blog,” the hover around 400 for “Online Games” and “Web Page Building/Updating,” and they index over 300 for “Social Networking, Last 30 Days,” and “Have 2 Social Networking Profiles.”

Gen Y are three times more likely than all online adults 18+ to participate in social media. @Plan deals strictly with the online audience. For me, when doing research, they are the only market about which I care. My products are all virtual – podcasts and now we are launching our online book/workshop publishing business, so if a prospect is not already online, I would never target them.

As well, Forrester’s “The State of Consumers and Technology: Benchmark 2008″ report shows that “GenYers love social and media activities but are less likely to shop online. Gen Y indexes at 242 for “visiting social networking sites.” I think the reason they are less likely to purchase online is because they are still learning, at their tender age, to be good consumers. They need to touch and feel, and they have more energy to go out shopping as a form of entertainment. They are also not yet having babies, unlike their GenX counterparts. GenX parents need online shopping as a way to save time, unlike the GenYer’s.

I assume other marketers (not the cpg’s with huge consumer budgets, but other online business owners like me) are focused only on the online addressable audience. And these online consumers are indexing at three times the norm for social media. The only other things they care equally or more about are online gaming, downloading music and blogging. I need to carve my mind share out of that set of competition for the Gen Y’s time and I need to reach them through these activities. Social media seems the natural place to not only market Personal Life Media’s offering, but to find those who are influential in recommending media and books to their friends.

Here is “The Global Online Media Landscape: Identifying Opportunities in a Challenging Landscape,” created by the team at Nielsen Online and authored by Charles Buchwalter,  Senior Vice President, Research & Analytics. It was given to all full-conference registrants at ad:tech last week. You can click here to download the full report. Some interesting facts include:

• There are 87 percent more online social media users now than in 2003, with 883 percent more time devoted to those sites.
• In the last year alone, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73 percent.
• In February, social network usage exceeded Web-based e-mail usage for the first time.

There’s an interesting chapter on Social Media in this Report. I asked Charlie his opinion on whether social media or “social influence marketing,” (my new favorite term) is an overhyped opportunity for marketers, just getting its legs or something that will be a small but effective part of the marketer’s tool box.

Charlie and Susan at ad:tech’s Chairman’s Reception 4/21/09

Here’s Charlie’s opinion, based on years of watching market dynamics.

Charlie says, “despite the tremendous growth in social networking, many are wondering if it is little more than the current hype popularized by the Gen Y crowd.” “While technology is allowing social networking to take root and flourish, it’s a technology that innovatively puts people and relationships with people first.”  “And because of this, savvy corporate marketers are discovering more natural, authentic  and meaningful ways to communicate with their customers.” “My gut: we’ve only witnessed the very early stages of how this phenomenon will transform the marketing landscape.”

Get your copy of the report here:

Report: Social Media And Video Site Engagement Reshapes The Web

John Cecil on Video Spokespersons, Pickle Fights and Surfing in OC

This week’s DishyMix interview focuses on video with a twist. I like video spokespersons, especially for landing page conversion improvement when the product is complex, the offer is complex or the navigation is complex. There are some great places to use video spokesperson and I interviewed John Cecil, co-founder of Innovate Media after going down to Orange County for a video shoot for a new product we’ll be launching from Personal Life Media.

Click HERE to see the “Day in the Life of a Video Spokesperson” shoot on my Flickr page.

Alissa Kriteman, host of Just for Women shooting her Video Spokesperson.

Dr. Patti Taylor, host of Expanded Lovemaking shooting her Video Spokesperson.

John James Santangelo, host of Sales Magic shooting his Video Spokesperson.

Here’s an excerpt from the show that I found very informative.

Susan Bratton:  So a video spokesperson is essentially the overlay of either a character or a human being that comes onto the page after it has loaded and tells you a little bit about what you’re seeing there.  Is that right?

John Cecil:  Yes.  It’s basically the transfer of the web turning from a text-based medium to a video-based medium, and our core product is the video spokesperson that comes out on the screen and lets a company give a pitch, if you will, in real time video about kind of what they want you to do, either buy a product, click on a button or move to another page.

Susan Bratton:  Well a lot of times too, in addition to giving directions about how to work the page you’re on, I think there’s a really big opportunity in verbally explaining products that are fairly difficult or complex.  I had mentioned to you TrustedID.  That’s a product that I use for identity theft protection.  It’s a proactive service that monitors your credit card and your health insurance and your bank accounts.  They seemed like a perfect company for you because their product is kind of hard to understand and you can go onto their site and read all the stuff, but text has its limits and it strikes me that not just getting people to click on a button or make a buy, but explaining products through a video spokesperson could work well too.  Are you finding that?

John Cecil:  I think every landing page, every website in some amount of time will have video on their sites.  There’s only so much text you can put on a page

Susan Bratton:  Well you can put a lot of text on a page, but no one will read it.

John Cecil:  Absolutely.  Video allows the consumer to get a video message about the product or service.  If I walked into a retail store, someone doesn’t hand me a brochure of what they’re selling.  There’s a live person there that’s talking to me about products and the services that that person is trying to sell.  We’re able, with the use of online video and our products, to sort of match that same thing – a full motion video communicating a message is replacing text.

Susan Bratton:  So a lot of people say, “I don’t like those video people to pop up on my page.”  But in reality, I think many times the people that I hear that from are people who are pretty web-savvy, not necessarily our target customers but ourselves as marketers and experienced web users.

You gave me a piece of research from a professor at Stanford University, Byron Reeves, the Center for Study of Language and Information. He did this big piece of research on video spokespeople and what popped out for me in this were, number one, having a human on the page creates a level of trust that you can’t get in other ways.  Number two, it makes interfaces easier to use which you mentioned, and number three, that the characters are well liked.  And I think if you think about the general web that characters, if well done, can be very well liked.

John Cecil:  I am backing up everything that he says and the way I can back it up is conversion data that we have.  It’s very interesting.  I have really never seen a product that consistently increases conversions so much as far as the video spokesperson product.  So to back up with what he is saying, so I’m going to compare two units.  We have a non-user initiated and a user initiated page with the same video spokesperson.  The video spokesperson that comes out without a user having to touch a button converts better than the one that requires user initiation.  And so we get into talking about being in the web and being sort of not annoyed by video or things along those lines.  The conversion data is telling us over and over again that this person coming out on the screen converts better.  And as a marketer, we have to get out of our bubble of knowing so much about the web and really look at the conversion data and ask what tools are helping us to kind of convert the best on our sites.

Susan Bratton:  One of the things in this study struck me.  It said,

“Research shows that over 90% of people can find a character in an interactive session that they prefer over no character at all.  It only takes five choices to provide a character that is liked but even when a single character is presented, only 15% of users dislike that character and those people can usually be accommodated by allowing them to opt out of the character interactions in favor of other forms of navigation.”  It was also funny later on in that he said, “Some people just don’t like anything.” 

I thought that was funny.  Are a lot of your customers just using one character and just testing with that or do you have clients who come in and try four or five different actors? Most of the video spokespersons are done with professional actors but you can have people from the company. (I want to talk about celebrities too but I’ll come back to that.)  Are most brands using professional actors and are they testing multiples or do they just pick the one they want?

John Cecil:  What our clients do is A/B test talent against each other and find the best converting person their particular customers like.  So in one case, a client of ours shot five different actors with the exact same scripts, some male, some female, some old, some young, and those five actors were A/B tested off of the home page and pitted against each other.  They chose the best performing video spokesperson from a conversion standpoint and that person became the video that they used on an ongoing basis.  Our more savvy clients are testing different characters against each other.

Susan Bratton:  And what about celebrities?  What about William Shatner coming out on the home page of Priceline?  Have we gotten there and how well does that do or how well do you think it will do?

John Cecil:  As an organization, we have just started to kind of scratch the surface on it.  The early data that we’re seeing is that it increases the increases that we’re already seeing, so we think that a known actor or actress is going to help even more with the conversion data on a particular site or landing page.

Bert has been on DishyMix and I have promoted his book, “You Have to Be Believed to Be Heard,” widely to my friends and compatriots.

At SXSW, Bert noted that panelists were monitoring Twitter to get audience feedback during presentations and panels. This behavior is not confined to the social media mecca that is SXSW. You’ll find panelists at ad:tech and other events doing the same thing.

I interviewed Bert about this phenomenon to get his opinions. Listen here to Bert Decker’s advice.

Susan Bratton & Bert Decker

And below is my complete DishyMix interview with him. If you are a public speaker, or want to be, this is a great interview, chock full of relevant and actionable advice.

Bert Decker on The First Brain, Transforming Your Personal Impact and The Decker Grid