TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

widget

Dominos: Rewarding fans or cheap affiliate deal?

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Interesting to note how Springwise reported a new Dominos widget which lets you refer people to order a pizza and earn cash. In the headline, ‘Domino’s recruits fans’, but in the first paragraph ‘lets consumers serve as affiliate marketers’.

The agency behind it, BLM Quatum, describe is as a ‘Social Affiliate‘ tool.

But let’s be honest.

It’s not recruiting fans or being social. It’s a nice affiliate marketing widget which pays 0.5% of any order for every person you can shoehorn into buying a pizza.

Without knowing what the average cost of an order is at Dominos, I can’t tell you whether or not it’s a good deal. Someone ordering a £13.99 medium pizza would earn you a little under 7p. Or 100 medium pizzas would earn you £6.99 for example. Apparently about the same as you’d get for an hours work delivering pizzas.

I’m not against affiliate deals – I often refer people to Amazon for example (See, did it there!)

You’ll find varying percentages for varying products, and unless you work very hard at it, none of them will make you rich, so I’m not necessarily querying the rate of reward. Although it does seem a little stingy when someone pays £100 on pizzas via your widget and inherent recommendation, and you earn a shiny 50p out of it.

But what I am questioning is whether this is ‘rewarding fans’ or a ‘social affiliate’ when it’s a shinier way of putting a tracking code on a hyperlink.

Save the earth, or some whisky

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A couple of interesting campaigns have come my way via a couple of agencies I know.

The first is the WWF Earth Hour, which is the campaign to get everyone to turn off their lights for one hour on Saturday, March 28, at 8.30pm. You can sign up to the movement, download posters, toolkits and resources (including web banners), or, coolest of all, add a light switch to allow visitors to ‘turn off’ your website.

When someone clicks on the light cord widget, your website goes dark, and the centre section is replaced with the Earth Hour countdown clock, with a message and a link to find out more about Earth Hour – people can still get back to your website by cancelling the message.

Rather a nice mix of message, resources, and a cool widget which I may try and insert here if I get a moment in time!

The second campaign which looks interesting is the chance to grab some bottles of Whyte and Mackay whisky by taking part in a Safari Hunt in Glasgow and London – via Twitter, email, and Google Latitude!

The Whyte and Mackay lions will be moving around pubs and bars in Glasgow on Friday March 27 (tonight!), before hitting London next week, and you can get clues and updates by emailing whytemackaysafari@googlemail.com, or by following on Twitter at @whytemackayhunt (if you need help with the cryptic clues, follow the #w&m hashtag). All you’ll have to do is locate the lions and walk up and touch them to get a free bottle of whisky (including some nice aged and special examples), or, if the bottles have run out, you’ll get a free drink… Personally I prefer whiskey to whisky, but I’m not one to turn down a free drink!

Mashable monetizes Twitter in an innovative way

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One way to monetise Twitter seems to be using feeds/information outside of the site itself – good news for sites and businesses, if not for Twitter directly.

Probably the best use so far is by Mashable, revealed today. In conjunction with viral scientist, Mashable contributor and Twitter uber-analyst Dan Zarrella, the site now has a widget displaying ‘Twitter Brand Sponsors’.

Quoting from Mashable:

‘Twitter Brand Sponsors is a small step towards our sociable ads goal. Here’s how it works: a limited number of brands (and one charity!) looking to engage with the social media community can have their latest Tweets syndicated into the Mashable sidebar, and interested visitors can choose to connect with those brands on Twitter.’

The first sponsors are Jetblue and Mailchimp, indicating that there’s interest at launch – it will be interesting to see how many companies are engaged with a suitable Twitter presence to benefit.

And it also removes the questions around the previous example of Glam’s Twitter feed widget, which displayed moderated #Oscar tweets in a widget with advertising:

Is it right to profit from user-generated content created on another site, and without the awareness of those creating the content?

Would advertisers, even those related to the target audience/subject get enough value from display advertising around Twitter content.

Instead, the Mashable approach allows people to see interaction from businesses (and charities), and decide whether or not to engage.

I have to admit, I’m wondering whether they’ll white-label the Twitter widget, as I’d be keen to run something similar!

Interesting use of a Twitterfeed to make money

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It’s not exactly engagement or interaction, but women’s online publishing and advertising network Glam has been using a widget which allows manual editing of the Twitter feed around an event to ensure the content is suitable for advertisers (From Venturebeat).

The widget is available throughout the Glam network, and to third-party publishers, who receive a cut of any revenue. And soon even publishers outside the network will be able to receive micropayments via Paypal.

It’s a traditional model, but one which appears to have worked, at least for the #Oscars.

But it suffers from the traditional problem of display advertising – in which the amount of eyeballs doesn’t always translate to the amount of people actively clicking on an advert. Although the sponsorship in this case was for a skincare company, which is likely to appeal to a female-targetted content network, would positioning it next to Oscar content give it relevancy or credibility?

And what does it mean for people who use Twitter hashtags without the knowledge that another party may profit from them?

After all, they were originally used to collate information for aggregating information about fires in San Diego, and have since been used for collating conversation around disasters like #Mumbai along with mainstream entertainment and sporting events.

It raises the eternal content question of the internet – should aggregators be able to collect all the revenue without compensating the content creators?

Awesome new Twitter plug-ins for WordPress

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You may notice a new icon on every post. It comes from Dan Zarrella (@danzarella), who I continue to be hugely impressed by.

It started back in December when I spotted his interesting analysis of Retweeting, and I’ve followed his Tweetback project. But now he’s gone waaaaay further with the TweetSuite Plug-in for WordPress.

It includes:

  • Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
  • ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
  • A digg-like Tweet-This Button
  • Automatic Tweeting of new posts
  • A Most-Tweeted Widget
  • A Recently-Tweeted Widget
  • A My-Last-Tweets Widget
  • A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget

I’m using it here and on www.thewayoftheweb.net, and so far it’s been simple and easy to use, and has worked ‘out-of-the-box’.

Interestingly, there’s already an alternative to Tweetbacks – The Twittbacks WordPress Plugin created for Smashing Magazine by Joost de Valk. (He’s also on Twitter as @jdevalk)

One outcome of the two plugins is an interesting post by Jonathan Bailey on whether reproducing Tweets could lead to copyright problems.

In the meantime, I’m using TweetSuite, and so far I can highly recommend it – the only suggestion that immediately sprang to mind is that the icon might be better placed at the footer of a post rather than top left or right, but that’s a minor point!

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