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Just over two weeks ago, I ordered a new pair of Sperry Top-Siders from ShoeBuy.com. Firstly, if you need to buy shoes online, there is a high chance that they will have the pair you are looking for at a discounted rate if you search for their monthly coupon codes. Also, their distribution is setup great (for those that live in the NYC area anyway) because orders are delivered within 3-4 business days.

Now back on subject- I tweeted out a thank you to @ShoeBuy for my happy customer experience and noted that their shipping is fast. Within a couple hours, I received an @ reply back from their brand monitoring employees on Twitter, saying something similar to “thanks for the compliment, we are glad you chose ShoeBuy.com”. The next day I received another @ reply from another rep at ShoeBuy, this time it was to notify me that I had won the “ShoeBuy.com Tweet of the Day”. This simple tweet about my positive customer experience resulted in a free $25 gift card from ShoeBuy by winning the tweet of the day. Props to ShoeBuy and their employees doing brand monitoring with social media. Great work, the Sperry’s fit great!

Now that I have digested the wealth of information offered to me while attending the Affiliate Summit East in New York City, one particular video mentioned by keynote speaker Peter Shankman has stood out; the mention of Stride Chewing Gum’s viral marketing initiative. Large corporations pay millions to develop marketing campaigns that they hope will go viral, for the sole intention of making a particular piece of media go viral (with their brand name splattered across the entire campaign).  Often the yield on the initiatives launched by most large corporations is not nearly equal to the cost of promoting the campaign.

Stride took a different approach to making their marketing campaign go viral. Peter Shankman said, “You can make something viral, but you can make something good.” That’s exactly what Stride did, instead of focusing on making the actual content go viral, they focused on producing really unique and interesting video content. Especially today, us humans love to share great things we find online; the people working for Stride knew this. So, Stride searched for a unique and inspirational video channel on YoutTube, figuring that YouTube is one of the most common launching platform for viral content. The result was choosing Matt Harding to travel, film, produce, and most importantly dance, all around the world with all types of people. Matt was chosen for his previous dancing video, and took the offer up from Stride, who allowed him to fulfill his dancing potential all around the world.

The production cost to Stride was minimal, simply covering all of Matt’s expenses while filming. The entire process took 14 months, from filming to publshing. Nearly 14 months later, the video has accumulated 23,000,000 views. Notice that Stride only reserved a small portion of advertising in the final seconds of the video, this was key to maintaining “good” content. In short, this viral video practically turned Stride into a popular gum choice for people across the globe very shortly.

If you haven’t already seen Matt dancing in “Where the Hell is Matt (2008)”, then I highly suggest you check it out. The movie is incredible, simply one of the best videos I have ever seen on the web-

Over the past couple years a few select companies have been extremely successful because of their ability to develop a revolutionary artificial intelligence tool that improves our quality of life. Why? The startups that have developed these smart applications are revolutionizing their industry, they are innovating new technology that thinks like we humans do, except only better. Algorithms developed by startups with substantial AI applications have proven to be very popular, because they only get smarter overtime, making better decisions from our behavior.

Who are these startups that lead innovation within their industries?

Animoto is revolutionizing cinematic artificial intelligence. Their product thinks and acts like a movie director and editor. No movie sideshow is ever the same.

Pandora creates a custom individual music station catered to each users music preferences. Their algorithms allow for the best passive music listening experience.

In case you haven’t seen the news over the past two years, Netflix just finished a contest with a $1 million prize for the team that could improve their AI based movie recommendation tool for their customers.

Clickable.com claims to have the smartest PPC management tool anywhere. Their tool makes recommendations for your PPC campaigns, so you can attain a larger ROI from your PPC advertisements.

Then of course, with the good, their is always bad. Many scientists have begun to worry that machines will soon be able to outsmart humans, and eventually take advantage of us. While this is likely not an immediate concern, scientists are proposing that research be stopped, so that humans will always have control over computers. Checkout this New York Times article.

Also, largely unseen to consumers, internet advertising is extremely sophisticated now when it comes to targeting. Many advertising networks now allow major corporations to enable targeting to a specific demographic; and then re-targeting based on a users actions if they did or did not buy the advertisement offer.

In the short term internet companies that are funding research and development for their AI products will succeed at having the most innovative, and likely most profitable product in their industry. Not to mention the value proposition against competitors is a major advantage to have in their industry.

A quick tip on landing page optimization for generating more revenue from your existing landing pages-

Add a simple “Subscribe To Our Newsletter” email submit on your landing page, linked to your email management software. If you are driving high amounts of traffic to a specific landing page, chances are a decent percentage of your traffic will want to subscribe to a newsletter that contains relevant information. (Make sure you get your visitors to double opt-in for CAN-Spam compliance.) A double opt-in email list is perfect for you to up sell offers in the vertical that you’re promoting. This will help create more stabilitly within your affiliate marketing campaigns and allow you to test offers for free with your email list.

An optimization technique such as this newsletter subscription is a win-win situation; let me know how it works out for you.