Gareth Ochse & Craig Corte from BuzzFuse, Jo Duxbury from Freelancentral, our own Jonathan Miller CEO of ForgeBusiness and Brian Carl Brown of Blue Catalyst who bought desert for everyone that nicely complimented the Stormhoek wine. Sadly Graham Knox didn’t make it.

We were very impressed with some of the presentations, as Mike Stopforth pointed out Jo showed what were arguably some of the most entertaining slides ever to grace a powerpoint presentation. Both Her and Jon’s presentations contained a lot of useful information supporting their understated but successful pitches. As for the body-parts video clip… nha…

I am truly looking forward to the next installment of 27dinner.

If you are interested in e-business in the SAfrican context, you might also enjoy attending one of our Online Marketing “Speed Briefing” sessions, details below and then on to a few snapshots I managed to grab on the night.

“South African e-Commerce – Hype or Sound Business?” 8:30 AM – 9:30AM.
“The wrong e-commerce strategy could kill your business.”

“New Media Masterclass workshop” 10:00 – 11:30 AM
“Understanding what drives media pricing online, how to negotiate better online marketing rates and ensure your online marketing delivers guaranteed results.”

Sign up here

Perhaps you’d like to suggest some captions?

I strongly suspect there will be a collaborative contribution to this cause from the local 27Dinner participants.

For a glimpse of what might be the makings of truly immersive marketing, beyond the banner, if you haven’t yet and are interested in this kind of phenomena read Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games at Wired.

My prediction is that ARGs will evolve into a highly competitive mediascape, where instead of the tightly owned and controlled independent instances of these early efforts we will see ’scenes’ spontaneously evolving with various commercial and other interests vying for attention and influence. Let the games begin! (and autopoëtic environs evolve:))

• mauritz@forgebusiness.com (Consulting)
• kelvin@forgebusiness.com (Networks)
• andre@forgebusiness.com (Other)

Research | Rate | Review & Earn

Search for a product feedback, read an unbiased review, or listen in on a blog before purchasing. Rate reviews, products, and experiences in order to make sure that only the best are rewarded. Share your unbiased expertise with others and earn dollars for your honesty and respect earned in the community.

This is the premise with which Bright Hub is poised to rock the software retail industry, soon.

wireless.itworld.com – Cash isn’t king: Apple limits iPhone purchases

That’s what Apple are allegedly loosing in unlocked iPhones. I don’t see Apple getting much sympathy for this but it makes for an interesting predicament. On the one hand they have obligations to their marketing partners – AT & T are seeing a quarter of a million accounts less than they are expecting to see and cannot be happy about that.

On the other hand, the Apple brand is all but built on consumer perception and sentiment. A large section of their most loyal following are self-professed ‘geeks’ who’d rather die than think of themselves as mainstream conformists. (I’ve always found this pnenomena around Apple rather ironic, given that the Apple design philosophy basically boils down to following the commonest denominator, be it in style )

It’s all about that old notion of being part of ‘the’ revolution, but most of these revolutionaries are armchair revolutionaries – they are paying top dollar to be on the same side as the real revolutionaries. They want to be friends with the guys who actually hack stuff. And this market segment, crammed as it is with technophiles, opinionmakers and product evangelists are the guys that Apple is squaring up to headbutt by only selling iPhones by credit or debit card.

The article doesn’t say what, if any steps will be taken against obvious breakers of the iPhone software and or the terms and conditions, beyond limiting sales to two units per individual.

My guess is not much. Would be interesting if they did though.

From a philosophical perspective the itworld article’s title says more than the entire article; No, cash isn’t king any more, at least not in our marketplace, here accountability is everything.

+1 for tracking.

André SC

Web2.0 is the most popular misspelling of the word VANITY…

– the moment people can contribute to an online space and, directly (e.g. Facebook) or indirectly (e.g. dig.com or MyBlogLog) build their own profile you are talking social media and things two-point-oh. Luckily it does go beyond the school-yard puddle like mutual admiration society culture that at first sight might appear to be the stuff of that other buzzword, increasingly flaunted with so much glee; User Generated Content or UCG for short.

For a really good example of potential and scale of the web2.0 user centered paradigm consider that the volunteer authored Wikipedia boasts 8.2 million articles in 253 languages (it sais so itself, I’m not going to count). Regardless of the rhetoric you may encounter around its accuracy, reliability and biases – that’s a whole lot of effort and collaboration you are looking at.

But what does it mean for marketing?

I’m no marketing guru but I think anyone can see that this Web 2.0 thing can facilitate ‘viral' and/or ‘word-of-mouth' marketing and indeed currently much attention from innovators, speculators and the inevitable snake-oil peddlers in our industry portals is congregating around the promise of effective marketing through the medium of online video.

The formal avenues for driving, managing and importantly measuring this kind of marketing are as far as I know still very much in flux and undefined, and in some respects perhaps down-right suspect.

On the informal side of the scene there has been mixed results achieved by applying various hybrid marketing models. The obvious route is perhaps to try and transfer those other phantoms of the marketing genre, Word-Of-Mouth and Viral advertising into the Web2.0 context with a bit of New-Media pizzazz from video or audio pod-casting. Incentivizing consumers to generate advertising for you through for example competitions for the funniest or best consumer generated add uploaded to a video sharing site seems to make a lot of sense. B.M.W is one advertiser who has implemented a few different guises of this strategy but there has also been a fair bit of skepticism around the actual value returned e.g. http://iplot.typepad.com/iplot/2006/05/bmw_says_no.html,

Me thinks the magic that can be achieved lies in the ‘mix’ – treating social media as a ‘through-the-line' auxiliary avenue for brand promotion and marketing.

First and foremost though, I think it is worth making sure you are covering the basics, have a strategy to monitor the web2.0 world of forums and blogs and actively scanning and possibly engaging in the ‘conversations' regarding your brand that naturally emerges.

You may want to apply the three ‘L’s: listen, learn and leverage.

From there it’s all about angle, timing skill and tenacity of your team.

Somehow the Red Bull Flugtag game comes to mind…

- What does it mean for those of us who want something more out of cyberspace than friend requests (’uhm… didn’t I date her or something back in 1996…?’) or casting our avatars in the pot with those of supposedly like minded strangers in support of or objection against some cause in a ‘group’ while trying to avoid getting drawn into the bickering that lurks in the associated discussion forums and ‘walls’.

(And allowing your psyche to sink even deeper into denial about the realisation that there must be more you can do to make a positive contribution to the world.)

Depending on your stance, online social networking services are either the blogosphere grown up and supercharged to mass-consumption-grade culture or a watered-down sorry excuse for the real thing, or maybe something in between.

As vague as the boundaries are becoming one can draw some interesting distinctions. The first that comes to mind, to my mind at least, is the issue of ownership and control. What you can and can’t do and what value you can get out of the process.

To my mind, the blogosphere is essentially the domain of individuals claiming and working their own little – and sometimes not so little – plots of cyber real estate.

The world of blogging used to be unspoilt frontiers country, and in some ways perhaps still is, but it is getting damn hard not to notice the sprawling arrays of lego-set-like apartment blocks of user-generated content, the thinly veiled silos of at least potentially ‘monetizable’ eyeballs.

But it may be that the competition is a good thing for the blogoshere.

When you sign up to Facebook you agree to use it for your personal “non-commercial” purposes. You might get away incorporating some paying links in some of your personal content but I suspect anything overtly commercial will get you in a spot of hot water. The exception to this being if you have what it takes to develop an application to plug into the Facebook APIs. (but you better play nice!)

In that case the Facebook Developer terms forbids you from showing any ads except on the application canvas pages – which to Facebook’s credit is a relatively fair deal – but allows significantly less fluidity than when you roll-your-own somewhere out in the ferral regions of hyperspace under your own, memorably pithy domain name.

None the less, me thinks that this approach seen in the light of very iinteresting facts and figures around Facebook, like for example that there are about 103 million active Facebook users for every one of the just over 300 employees. Facebook seems to be running a bit like Ultimate Frisbee, a competitive sport in which referees are all but obsolete. This mentality of preserving the ’spirit of the game’ is why I bet Facebook will sustain resonance with consumers, are in it for the long haul and will go down in history as a marketing success story.

So how is any of this good for us mere bloggers?

Well me thinks a lot of the self satisfied mindless drivel that has been increasingly clogging the arteries of the blogosphere, the gunk congesting the synapses of the noosphere has found a brand new home. One infinitely more efficient at catering to the insipid mundanities of herd instinct, the gratuitous exchange of cutesy clipart and the very life blood of web2.0 as we know it – VANITY! :- )

Don’t get me wrong – I love Facebook ( – maybe this is why ;- )

Facebook and its kin might just have a very positive impact on the quality of ‘real’ blogs. So we’ll see less of what who-ever did who-else in a bout of drunken stupor over the weekend and more skillfully crafted original and meaningful content.

Maybe this will improve the chances for ordinary people to do something that stands out, to enter the commercial media arena on their own terms armed with creativity, conviction, maybe a blogspot account or hand-full of WordPress plugins – and of course a BlogKits Review campaign or two : )

André SC

If you are reading this you probably know what the Internet is, and you probably also know how important internet based marketing has become. It is for many businesses a primary medium through which to promote and sell products and services to clients around the world, 24×7x365.

In this post we dig into some of the fundamentals of what is arguably one of the most important aspects of internet based commerce, affiliate marketing. (This also happens to be our primary focus here at ForgeBusiness

Online marketing may consists of various combinations of different techniques including:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Direct Response Marketing (DRM), e.g. Newsletters etc.
• Relationship Marketing, e.g. blogging, e-mail,
• Directories, link schemes
• Embedded Content Media e.g. Product & Brand Placement etc.
• Multi Level Marketing, e.g. referral ‘kick-backs' and ‘pyramid-schemes' etc.
• Various forms of unsolicited marketing communication, or spam
• and more…

As we pointed out earlier our focus is on affiliate marketing. We believe that in most cases it is the best way to establish a win-win marketing dynamic while capitalizing on some of the most important technological, commercial and cultural developments of our time.

New Media Age defines affiliate marketing as:

the process whereby an online merchant or advertiser recruits a network of other Web sites (affiliates) to drive traffic to its site. The affiliate then displays ads on its site and when a customer clicks through to the merchant site, the affiliate gets a commission…

Basically, it is a system geared around the internet and the idea of paying for results. Someone, called the affiliate, can choose to promote specific products from ‘merchants' who in turn are willing to pay for purchases or enquiries about their offerings. There may be no other link between the affiliate and the merchant other than the agreement to do exactly this. This means an affiliate can represent various merchants, and merchants' representation is not limited by the number of sales-people they can fit behind desks and counters in ‘brick-and-mortar' establishment or even afford to send out ‘on-the-road'.

This works particularly well were affiliates either serve a niche interest group and/or has established themselves as a trusted authority or subject-matter expert in a particular field. The radical speed at which such a marketing network can grow, or collapse and the economies of scale that can be achieved, or missed out on without efficient affiliate market management, is what makes affiliate marketing so important in our view.

In his Manifesto for Experimentation [http://www.changethis.com/pdf/30.06.Experimentation.pdf] Joseph Jaffe who is a marketing guru to the likes of MSN, Google, Reuters, CNET Networks and ESPN writes:

…the world has changed; the consumer has changed;

the organization has not. Technology is, or as, change agent. The consumer is changing,

but the marketing discipline resists or refuses to change.

The result is a disconnect. A gap. A chasm that has to be bridged…

In other words the marketplace is changing in ways that are significantly challenging conventional marketing disciplines. Competition is increasing across the field and ‘one-size-fits-all' approaches are increasingly being shunned by consumers.

As if evidence is required, take this observation by David Pogue [] of the New York Times in the context of CompUSA closing half of its 250 stores.

I think the real culprit behind the gutting of CompUSA is Internet pricing. You can order computers, accessories and electronics from the Web for a fraction of CompUSA's in-store prices–and evidently, most people are doing exactly that. (It's not just CompUSA, by the way.

Circuit City is closing 70 stores, too. And don't forget the 30-year-old Good Guys chain–46 electronics stores in California–which CompUSA bought in 2003 and then closed in 2005.)

Relevance, the degree of precision with which marketing messages are aimed to cut through the noise and clutter of the media landscape has become the name of the game.

Enter affiliate marketing campaigns, arguably the most exciting and perhaps even the most reliable way – if properly managed – to target and engage consumers, where they live. A way to start bridging the chasm Mr. Jaffe describes.

Our approach and offerings here at Forge offers a fantastic foundation to leverage the potential of online marketing. To borrow a phrase from a case study on affiliate marketing by Dennis L Duffy, it's like

having a large, independent, purely commissioned sales force…

Affiliates (also referred to as a publishers or partners) are paid only for actions that are performed (i.e. click, sales, subscription). It is in their interest to pursue effective communication and relevance in promoting offers to their audience. Often such publishers have remarkable insight into the needs and requirements of their audience which can translate into very persuasive promotions. It does also make it very important to support and service the requirements of the affiliates, as understandably excellent affiliate partners are in high demand.

To summarize how affiliate marketing works:

• The affiliates and merchants agree on what action the referred customer needs to perform in order for the affiliate to qualify for payment.
• The affiliate, a web site or newsletter publisher directs consumers to a merchants/advertisers site.
• The referred traffic is monitored.
• The affiliates get commissioned on a pay-per-performance basis.
• The merchant pays the affiliate for successful advertising.
• The merchant might provide the advertiser with data feeds, similar to detailed product catalogues that allows affiliates to select (manually or through automation) which products to promote and gives them access to media elements (often called ‘creative').

The principles are simple, achieving success in the affiliate marketing industry not necessarily. Merchants can outsource the affiliate marketing aspects of their marketing portfolio, or even specific aspects of their affiliate marketing activities. When outsourcing to an affiliate management solution, one of the primary concerns facing a merchant is whether or not their brand will be treated with its due respect. Forge Business researches and coordinates on behalf of the merchant. We ensure that the clients branding is effectively (and ethically) placed with appropriate affiliates/publishers for optimal results. We at Forge understand that merchants are often worried about being left out of the process affecting their brand; this is why we keep all our customers up to date and involved with fifteen day reports.

There are many affiliate programs and networks available today. Albeit, the number of programs heavily outweighs the number of experienced and/or capable affiliate managers. Very often people who may call themselves affiliate managers highly underestimate the competencies that are necessary for the operation of a thriving program. The managing of an affiliate program, make no mistake, is a full-time job that requires skilled staff!

Integrated performance marketing, is what we at ForgeBusiness are all about. We provide a safety net for those companies who wish to take advantage of the potentially very lucrative arena of e-commerce. Our approach and offerings are guided by our focus on results-driven affiliate marketing. This is a strategy that has allowed our clients the freedom to measure and assess their success while doing what they do best.

Affiliate marketing, when correctly managed, offers a fantastic opportunity to leverage the potential of online marketing. Call us!

Well done Peapod!

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