This is a picture of Rustam, Nick, Susie, Colleen and Ross in NYC for Affiliate Summit East.  Our booth was in a great location and we had a ton of visitors.  We had a great show and look forward to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas in January.  Everyone did a fantastic job and this was Susie and Colleen’s first time in the big apple.  I think it’s safe to say they had an awesome time.  We truly have a great team!

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Affiliate Summit New York 2010
New York, Empire State of Mind…. Concrete jungles where dreams are made of!  The city welcomed us on Sunday afternoon. For the two us this was of first trip to The Big Apple. What a sight! Time Square was mind-boggling. Wow, let’s leave it at that.

What we were really looking forward to was getting to put a face to a name of our clients. It’s always good to meet those we work with on a daily basis, and learn about their businesses.  Here’s a brief rundown of our ASE experiences.

Day 1
After a fun night at Old Castle and show tunes in the ballroom with friends, the day started bright and early at 10am. From 10 until the end of the day the exhibit hall was slammed.  Usually we’d expect a lull during lunch, but not this first day.  The show officially ended at 5pm, but that wasn’t the end for us! When our feet were tired and our voices were just about gone – the day wasn’t over.  The exhibit hall was still swarming with people.

During our busy first day we met a lot of new potential advertisers and even merchants looking to get exposure for their products online – Which is good news for our affiliates. There will be a lot more new offers coming your way.

Day 2

The various parties that were hosted on Monday night resulted in a slow start to Tuesday (Thanks Scott from Adknowledge for the VIP passes!).  People started filtering through the exhibit hall around noon, and we had the opportunity to meet a lot more publishers. By about 3:30pm, business was just about done for the day. Attendees started using their drink tickets… of which there were plenty! We used ours for bottled water! By 4pm it was time for us to get in our “limo” and head to the airport. A couple of us couldn’t handle the Chinese buffet lunch, bumpy ride, heat and pure exhaustion so the porcelain princess was their savior at the airport; others of us, managed just fine!

All in all, it was a great show. With great people! The trends that we noticed were mobile marketing, Click to Call, PPV, and telemarketing. We have great leads for new advertisers meaning new offers for our growing publisher base. Thanks Shaun and Missy for a great show once again.

Written By,

Collleen Darwent & Susie Bordner from RevenueStreet

Social media has provided affiliates with a whole new landscape to promote products and services.  It is a fundamental shift in the way people communicate.  Whether it is through video product reviews on YouTube, fan pages on Facebook, 140 character messages on Twitter, or tags on Flickr, the opportunities available on social media websites continues to grow.

Highlighted in a video produced by Socialnomics author Erik Qualman, are some fascinating social media stats including:
•    Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the US
•    YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world
•    If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest
•    25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user generated content

With social media becoming such a major media player and influencer, it is important that affiliates learn how to tackle this burgeoning area.  Following are some important tips and rules that affiliates should keep in mind when developing their social media campaigns:

Keep up to date on the changing advertising policies on each social media site. Social media channels are monitoring their sites more closely.  If they suspect suspicious behavior then you run the risk of getting your account suspended.  Play by the rules!

There are several tools available to help you track who and what is being said about you and the message you are putting out. Free tracking tools include blogsearch.google.com, search.twitter.com, search on Facebook and search on Youtube.  Paid tracking tools are also available including Brandwatch, Whitevector and Synthesio which provide better accuracy. Listen to your followers, you can learn from what they are saying.

With growth comes competition. The rise in popularity of social media channels has led to a rise in price in CPCs/CPMs.  However, pricing can be managed effectively by utilizing high converting creative and ad copy.
Learn and address privacy issues. For example, people have mixed reactions towards ads that highlight/speak to private demographic information that they have included in their profiles, especially when this information does not relate to the product you are promoting.  There is a fine line between being effective and being obtrusive, make sure to look at things from an advertiser as well as consumer prospective.

Make sure to engage and interact with your followers. Social media is all about being able to have an open communication with your consumers. Listen to what your followers are saying and focus on building trust, goodwill and loyalty with them.  Accept the good with the bad, address any negative comments immediately with a genuine response. In the end, you will be more respected for it!

Finally, have fun, get creative and make the best use of these tools to engage your new audience!

REVIEW SUMMARY
Company. The Media Crew
Industry. Online advertising
Key. Catching on to a growing medium without getting caught up in the momentum
By the Numbers. Click here for revenue information.
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Corporate Report: July 23 – July 29 Find Good Humans Overdue Operation Gulf Coast Week: July 23 – July 29

Like a surfer watching for the right wave, Nick Foley awaited a swell of momentum in online advertising for much of the past decade. Even as banner ads became more commonplace on Web sites, advertisers were largely reluctant to trade such digital displays for tried-and-true print.

Now it appears the tides are starting to roll in for online ads based on the amount of revenue growth Foley’s small Largo-based company, The Media Crew, has achieved in the last few years. The agency, which makes money from the number of times the ads it produces are clicked on or through, made the Inc. 500 list of the nation’s fastest-growing companies last year and looks to a repeat appearance later this summer.

Three-year revenue growth of 536.7% between 2005 (just over $500,000) and 2008 ($3.2 million) ranked The Media Crew at No. 488 on Inc. magazine’s annual list, a designation it proudly displays on its themediacrew.com site and inside its 2,500-square-foot office near Walsingham and Ulmerton roads.

But rather than focusing on how to top that success, Foley wants to sustain the company’s growth for many more years to come.

“We want to take smart steps, but baby steps,” says the president, general manager and “head geek” of the 16-member enterprise. “We don’t want to grow too fast and we make strategic moves each time we hire someone.”

The Media Crew operates on a performance-based marketing model, meaning essentially that it doesn’t get paid unless the ads are effective. Instead of getting paid each time an ad is clicked on, it gets paid only when a desired action — a purchase or registration — happens after the ad is clicked on. It provides companies with enabling technology to connect with consumers through online media, e-mail and other services, and is behind a group of online affiliate marketing networks.

Surfing Web and water

A University of Maryland graduate who grew up visiting relatives near Clearwater Beach, Foley found a way to combine work and surfing when he established The Media Crew in 1999 with only three people and a small office across the street from the Gulf of Mexico.

The company now has an additional office in downtown Orlando and is also represented by five offsite international programmers.

The Media Crew consists of several segments — RevenueStreet, a performance-based advertising network; WagonMailer, an e-mail marketing portal; and Effectus, the company’s recently launched proprietary marketing software. It’s a lot to keep up with day to day, which is why Foley places such a strong emphasis on staffing.

“You get to a point where you can only do so much,” he says. “You have to have the right people.”

One of the company’s key additions in recent years is Rustam Irani, a previous consultant to The Media Crew who now serves as its chief operating officer.

Irani, a Canadian-born graduate of the University of Florida whose entrepreneurial parents hail from India, says he was fortunate to join the company in a full-time role at the crest of its growth wave.

“It was just a perfect fit. It has worked out fantastic,” Irani says, noting that he tends to the business side of The Media Crew’s operations while Foley handles the creative segment.

Clicks amount to cash

The Media Crew operates on a simple performance-based marketing concept: It doesn’t get paid unless an ad works.

Clicking on online ads results in a virtual clinking of coins in a cash box, from a nickel to a dollar each time, while those ads producing sales leads or actual transactions can generate as much as $15 to $20, according to Irani.

The agency’s sites produce between one million and three million registrations per month in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, he says. Its RevenueStreet network averages one million clicks, at least 300 sales and more than 20,000 leads per month.

“Companies are becoming a lot more knowledgeable about online advertising and what constitutes a good return on investment,” Irani says. “They know their product, they understand their margin and if they generate a lead or a sale, they’re happy. There is still such a huge growth potential.”

The Media Crew currently works with 4,000 advertising affiliates, offering most everything from technical school information to brand-name consumer goods, though that is only a fraction of the business other comparable local companies do. For example, ClickBooth, a subsidiary of Sarasota-based IntegraClick, claims at least 30,000 affiliates.

Foley says there is a lot of cross-promotion or “co-opetition” between online ad companies. “I characterize them more as partners than competitors,” he says. “At the end of the day, we both make money together.”

Reinvesting profits

Instead of spending profits as wildly as they seem to be generated lately, The Media Crew reinvests into developing new software and platforms as well as increasing efficiencies. “We want to maximize and leverage our technologies,” Irani says.

But that doesn’t mean employees aren’t entitled to a few job perks or allowed to have fun every once in a while. Foley says the company will take a weekday afternoon off to catch a Tampa Bay Rays game at St. Petersburg’s Tropicana Field, or end the workweek early on a few Fridays in the summer for a barbecue behind the office.

“You’re on a personal level with everyone here,” Foley says. He adds that the company considered moving to larger office space elsewhere in southern Pinellas County, but decided to put that money toward tech and people instead.

The Media Crew also strives to give back to the community. Irani says the parent company is in the process of starting a non-profit organization called Gulf Coast Giving.

“We’re staying humble,” he says, adding that it will eventually be too difficult to sustain the type of triple-digit percentage growth in coming years that put the company on the Inc. 500.

“You can take that momentum and throw all sorts of resources at it.” Irani says. “We don’t want that spike only to have it come back down. We want our growth to be gradual.”

For the time being, The Media Crew is enjoying ongoing business recognition. Revenue Performance magazine recently listed RevenueStreet among its top 20 performance marketing networks and exchanges, and Florida Trend magazine will soon include the company among its best small-business employers in the state.

As is usually the case, more work means less time for play, therefore Foley’s employees see him a lot more around the office.

“He used to go surfing during lunch,” Irani says. “He isn’t able to do that as much anymore.”

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TheMediaCrew has been honored as one of Florida’s Best Companies To Work For in 2010 by Florida Trend magazine. To qualify for consideration, all of the candidate companies must have been in business for at least one year and employ 15 people or more. The results will be published in Florida Trend’s August issue and online at FloridaTrend.com.

For TheMediaCrew, Florida’s Best Companies To Work For 2010, is a designation that is especially meaningful, given the number of companies who participated in the survey in this category. In the survey, a small business company is one that employs between 15 and 49 people.  Small Business companies in Florida vastly outnumber large size companies.

To identify Florida’s best employers, Florida Trend partnered with the Best Companies Group.  Any firm with at least 15 employees in Florida, including firms based outside the state couple participate at no cost.  Firm were divided into 3 groups – large companies 250+ employees, midsized companies 50 to 249 employees and small companies 15 to 49 employees.  This year TheMediaCrew was ranked #20 out of 25 finalists in the 15 to 49 worker group.

All of the participating companies, including TheMediaCrew, were asked for information about their demographics, corporate philosophy, practices, systems, and workplace policies. The second part of the process involved company employees. They were asked to evaluate their employers and reveal whether or not they found their work environment to be a satisfying one.

“Creating a working environment which workers WANT to come to each day was our goal.  We strive to make all our workers happy working for TheMediaCrew.  A company is only as good as it’s workers.  SO creating a positive work environment for our workers is key to our companies success.  The saying “take care of the people who take care of you” holds true here at the TheMediaCrew, said Nick Foley CEO of TheMediaCrew.