Viva9 organised the first Australian affiliate/performance marketing conference http://www.affiliatsyd.com, which was held last Wednesday, May 13th in Sydney.
Our aim was to create a wide-ranging list of topics and speakers, and really focus on interesting and challenging content, rather than the dreaded 'Advertorials' that we have all seen in our professional lives.
We were also keen to present different perspectives - publishers, clients, agencies, emailers, social media experts, and Super-affiliates, and I think we succeeded really well.
Firstly, I have been bowled over by the response - 200 delegates registered, and for our morning keynote it was standing-room only, with over 170 people in the room.
The keynote was Mr Jay Berkowitz, CEO of Ten Golden Rules, and he was fantastic - he built his presentation from the building blocks of how to create a powerful online presence from the very basics, all the way up to really cutting-edge stuff, which had me scribbling furiously. He is a great speaker, and a lovely guy to boot, and we really enjoyed having Jay at the conference - it was a fantastic start to the day.
Other highlights:
Our Social Media panel, with Lee Hopkins, Laurel Papworth, and Jay doubling up, was awesome, Lee is full of passion and ideas, and was inspiring. Laurel, one of Australia's most prominent bloggers, and Twitterers, talked about the 'Ripple Effect' of social media, which was great, and Jay focused on his pet topics of audio podcasts and the power of online video, as well as the need to create and maintain your own personal brand.
Our power affiliate panel exceeded all of our expectations - Roland Bleyer (never a man to be short of an opinion) and Greg Simon from Fat Cat Rewards gave us an insight into the world of the Super-affiliate - men who live and breathe performance marketing. Craig Seitam from Shopper's Bonus came at it from a different perspective - the '10 hours a week' man, who derives about A$1,000 a week from his affiliate activities - not bad....
Other highlights were Dave Fowler from Lyris HQ, a hard-core email deliverability man if ever I met one, as well our Sports Betting panel - still trying to remember the tips they gave at the end.
Anyhoo, more to come on this topic - watch this space.
cheers
matt
