Are Affiliate Marketers Big Kids?
Online marketing has become so deeply attached to social media that when a marketer gets banned from one of many portals, other marketers start a boycott against that portal. After all, an affiliate marketer is a lot of things at once -- SEO, PPC/SEM, publisher, etc. -- so staying on top of things becomes critical.
Because affiliate marketers don't just blog and social bookmark, but stay connected though communities such as MyBlogLog, BumpZee, and SEOYak, staying connected becomes absolutely integral to remaining competitive. So when they're denied access to one of many social networks, they may very well feel that their right to earn a living has been infringed upon. But considering that the concept of online social networks is something that first took off with kids (and continues to enjoy a level a popularity among them that is unparalleled by any other age demographic) is it possible that by earning an income by mingling, Affiliate Marketers are like Toys R Us kids who never have to really grow up?
Well, in the sense that bridging a generational gap (at least in term of mean if not ends), perhaps they are staying forever young. After all, these social media outlets provide us nothing more than another way to express ourselves. It's just that while kids are expressing the feeling and emotions that kids so often do, online marketing professionals are expressing the concerns and demands that fully mature members of the market do -- and that's why Andy Beal is lashing out at MyBlogLog for what they did to someone else. As Mich Joel over at Twist Image Blog illustrates:
we might be forgetting all of the young people who are no longer just expressing themselves by wearing all black and slapping a Marilyn Manson poster on the back of their bedroom doors. Now, because of access to easy technology and an always on link to the world, while they’re behind those doors they’re quicker to film what they’re thinking and upload it to YouTube then they are to share their emotions with their parents, family and friends.
What has Mitch musing is an article in New York Magazine. It's all about how younger generations are bearing all online. As the article reads:
Because the truth is, at 26, Kitty is herself an old lady, in Internet terms. She left her teens several years before the revolution began in earnest: the forest of arms waving cell-phone cameras at concerts, the MySpace pages blinking pink neon revelations, Xanga and Sconex and YouTube and Lastnightsparty.com and Flickr and Facebook and del.icio.us and Wikipedia and especially, the ordinary, endless stream of daily documentation that is built into the life of anyone growing up today. You can see the evidence everywhere, from the rural 15-year-old who records videos for thousands of subscribers to the NYU students texting come-ons from beneath the bar. Even 9-year-olds have their own site, Club Penguin, to play games and plan parties. The change has rippled through pretty much every act of growing up.
In other words, the phenomenon of social media is very much a generational one. So are Affiliate Marketers nothing more than big kids? Absolutely, but the thing about children is that their life-expectancy tends to reach very much beyond that of those who are already all grown up.
As Mitch, himself, pointed out, the Complete Article is both informative and well researched, and I recommend checking it out for yourself.
