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Down-line affiliate relationship

MM: How else would you see that downline affiliate relationship working? Obviously, that would accelerate the propagation of another client for you. Right?

RT: Sure. Again, one of our key strategy plays is to help our clients determine and look at all of the different ways that they can do that. Specifically, other people who are vested in the content that you’re providing. And helping us at the level of providing that content that’s going to drive the community by putting them in the place where they can provide the content, themselves. Or link into the content, and embed the content within the community.

The other really great thing about a platform is that we can read in digg, del.icio.us, RSS from many different places and allow the community to consume those, as well. That gives them the ability to repurpose content.

MM: Now, as the digg or del.icio.us community starts doing its social bookmarking around some of your content they’re just basically out there, and you’re not part of any kind of revenue share. Is that right?

RT: That’s right.

But what makes the more compelling story is… If someone were marking a specific type of content, we know what kind of content they were bookmarking. We can go find it for them.

Specifically, what we try to do is work with our clients, to identify the type of social media content — usually a social bookmarking, to identify the media categories that these people are trying to consume — and provide that for them, dynamically.

MM: So in a digg or del.icio.us group, you add additional tags for them?

RT: Yes. We just catalogue the tags ourselves, too. We have to pass the information on anyway. So we just capture it and we make sure we know what they’re looking for. In that case, we can actually be proactive in finding content for them that they may be specifically interested in.

We’re really trying to drive the content that’s specific to the content that our clients want their social media and networking people looking at. So they’re shaping it more around their brand and product offering. Specifically, a community that’s built around Yamaha Outdoors, that’s using a version or a platform that allows members to create social things like digg and del.icio.us. Using social bookmarking to create bookmarks around sports fishermen — different types of sports fishermen. Yahoo’s infinitely interested in that, because they sponsor 16 of the top bass pros. We’re trying to drive their bass pro content, because they’re already offering it up and they’re already invested in producing that content. We’re trying to demonstrate the ability to get more people to see that content that they’ve already created.

Earned media, not owned

MM: That Yamaha content that they generated live at Yahoo?

RT: No. It lives within the community that we created for them.

But it’s bookmarked, and it’s part of digg and del.icio.us. So other people can find it from many different sources. What we’re doing is using those captured bookmarks to push more of their specifics.

So if somebody were on our community looking for comments about a particular flywheel for a particular rod, we could send them content specifically from one of the bass pro sponsors that Yamaha Outdoors is sponsoring. Obviously, they’re going to be promoting the flywheel from the Yamaha line.

MM: This clearly would be a good segue into using more like user-generated video and professionally generated video.

RT: Yes, it would.

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