Affiliate Summit Boston Day Two Recap

Welcome back!

Day two of the Affiliate Summit started off with a fantastic speech from the Mayor of Newark, Cory Booker.  I had my reservations about a politician speaking at a conference for affiliate marketers, but his speech was inspirational, motivational, and full of emotion.  As Trisha Lyn noted after the speech, if you weren’t ready to conquer the world after that speech, you weren’t paying attention.

For the first session, I wanted to go to all three morning sessions and I ended up going to content that kills.  Fortunately, Shawn and Missy record all the sessions, so I will be able to watch the other two when they come out in video!  Content That Kills was a great session with Lisa Picarille of Revenue Magazine moderating and Angel Djambazov and Kim Rowley on the panel.  Unfortunately, Lisa lost her voice in an incident with a flower arrangement from the night before, but she soldiered through the session with great professionalism.  All three provided great ideas and action items for me to take away from the panel.

I decided to try to go back to my room to attempt to fix my broken computer during the next session, at which I was limitedly successful and then I started seeing Tweets about the ethics panel that made it sound like things were getting pretty heated in that session.  So, I ran over to the conference to catch the tail end of the discussion and comment/question section.  This was clearly a topic about which people have very strong feelings about and I’m sure we’ll continue to see these feelings as the industry grows.

Then I went to the session titled “How Social Media Is Changing Affiliate Marketing.”  Ted Murphy of IZEA headed up a panel of Chris Brogan, Rob Key, and Stephanie Agresta.  A couple of key points from this session that I took away were that disclosure adds value through trust and influence, thereby increasing sales and that it’s difficult to track ROI (return on investment) from social media.  Until the very end of the session, I felt as though the panel felt social media fails due to the inability to track ROI.  This was the impression I had from the session, overall, that social media is just a bunch of gossiping among friends and acquantainces, rather than true business development.  Does everything need to have a tangible, measurable ROI to be valuable?  I don’t think so and the panel seemed to reverse course near the end, however the majority of the session focused on the former stance.

For the last session of the day, I went to see Jay Berkowitz talk about the Ten Hottest Strategies for Internet Marketers.  I always get a lot from Jay and his Summit presentation was no exception.  As always, Jay turns you on to new sites, breakthrough strategies, and motivates you to action when you leave his sessions.

After this last session, I went down to find out what was going on for dinner and catch the Affiliate Road Rally.  The winning car one by over two laps, I think.  Not much of a race, but very fun, nonetheless.

Throughout the day, I met many people that I’d only chatted with online and a lot of new friends.  I’m sure I would leave some out if I tried to name them all, but I will say that I got my picture taken with a penguin, got to eat a fantastic dinner with the Ultimate Foodies, and discuss physics with an MIT grad.  Overall, a great day two of the conference.

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