There’s an interesting article posted today at Micro Persuasion by Steve Rubel about Online Marketing Trends to Watch in 2006, particularly about Social Commerce.

An excerpt:

Lots of folks like to to talk about how advertising - particularly from Adsense and BlogAds - will be the primary DIY media revenue driver in a Long Tail world. Certainly this prophecy rings true for some. However, for most bloggers and podcasters, it won’t. The reason is the advertising industry is still largely dominated by Short Tail thinking. Their yardstick is eyeballs. So I don’t see ads generating more than pocket change for the majority of citizen’s media projects, at least right now (more to come on this topic in a future trend).

Social commerce, however, is an area that I think holds a tremendous amount of promise as a way for bloggers to make money. It’s a win-win for the bloggers, product marketers and existing e-commerce sites.

What I find interesting, however, is his prediction for even more advanced affiliate programs:

Watch for sites like Amazon, Froogle and Yahoo to develop turnkey stores that can be integrated into blogs. This will take affiliate programs to the next level. It’s also possible that some electronic commerce sites will partner with the major blogging platforms to make co-branded social commerce even easier. Let’s not forget that startups are hard at work here too, as David Beisel notes. Finally, we may see bloggers who have built a following in certain subject matters, like Thomas Hawk who writes about photography, to go the Treonauts route as they become disenfranchised with e-commerce sites.

While this is indeed a possible development, I do not see this as particularly advantageous for the “…majority of citizen’s media projects…” that he refers to earlier. Integration of turnkey stores into blogs could undermine the credibility of any recommendations given by the blogs due to the appearance of even closer affiliation with merchants than before. If we are indeed talking about the majority of blogs out there, then we are considering blogs that have a small loyal readership built on trust of the impartiality of the bloggers involved.

trends, marketing, advertising, affiliates, amazon

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