We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date.

Please be assured that all qualifying referral fees earned prior to June 26, 2009 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with our regular referral fee schedule. Based on your account closure date of June 26, 2009, any final payments will be paid by September 1, 2009.

In the event that North Carolina repeals this tax collection scheme, we would certainly be happy to re-open our Associates program to North Carolina residents.

The North Carolina General Assembly’s website is http://www.ncleg.net/, and additional information may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance at http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com/.

We have enjoyed working with you and other North Carolina-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

It’s interesting that Amazon has shut the program down before the legislation passes. Could it be that the NC lawmakers thought Amazon was bluffing too? Did Amazon close the program early so that affiliates would still have time to ramp up their complaints to the General Assembly.

Of course, there are plenty of other companies that will keep their affiliate programs running in NC–though Commission Junction doesn’t appear to be one of them–but will there be enough actual affiliate revenue to tax after this?

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Based on a post for the General Counsel for Facebook

As I read the post my greatest question was did they actually get 30% of their active users to vote so the following statement in a post from Facebook’s Grand High Poobah, Mark Zuckerberg, would play out

We encourage you to participate and make your voice heard. For this vote and any future one, the results will be binding if at least 30 percent of active Facebook users at the time that the vote was announced participate. An active user is someone who has logged in to the site in the past 30 days.

There was a ton of speculation around what that number actually was. Based on Ullyot’s post announcing the results (this seems so silly in light of covering important votes like political elections, doesn’t it?) there are a few questions raised. Ullyot states

The more than 600,000 users who voted constitute a significant number of people, but at the same time that’s a small number compared to our user base of more than 200 million. We made significant efforts to make voting easy and to give everyone the opportunity to vote — including by translating the documents and voting application into several of the most popular languages on the site, showing a message about the vote on users’ home pages, and running advertisements and videos across Facebook promoting the vote.

Ok, 600,000 voters. If this were to be binding then that means there are only 2 million active users. Even if only 50% of the total Facebook user number that is popular to quote now (200 million) are active then 30 million votes would be needed for a binding result. Either way this is some bad math for Facebook.
So what’s the real deal here? Facebook is saying that

the preliminary numbers indicate that approximately 74.4 percent of users who voted chose the proposed documents – the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities – over the existing Terms of Use

74% of 600,000 remember. So unless Facebook fesses up to much lower usage numbers or they choose to ignore the 30% rule this vote is strictly a PR move. They can actually still do whatever they want because their requirement of 30% of the total users being involved in the vote for the results to be binding probably was not met. If it was met then advertisers are going to be very interested in that ‘unspoken result’ that says ‘well, looks like we only have 2 million actual users in the last 30 days’.

Ullyot’s post says further

We’d hoped to have a bigger turnout for this inaugural vote, but it is important to keep in mind that this vote was a first for users just like it was a first for Facebook. We are hopeful that there will be greater participation in future votes. In the meantime, we’re going to consider lowering the 30-percent threshold that the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities establishes for a user vote to be binding.

Also, in an attempt to look like this vote is ‘rubber stamped’ by the loudest proponents of change the Facebook post gives links to the 4 biggest people involved in the ‘movment’. Looks good unless you actually click on the links and see that they are all dated prior to the results being reported.

So basically this ‘result’ is in question still. Advertisers will be very interested in how many people are actually using Facebook vs. those who just have an account. Also, all of this reaching out to the people stuff could really be just a big PR play with little substance. Or, if there is an actual statement buried somewhere that says this is or is not a binding result, either there are only 2 million active users in the last 30 days of Facebook or people don’t care nearly as much as we think. Either way the folks over at Twitter must be snickering because once again Facebook’s attempts to be transparent leave the waters more muddied than ever.

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The panel looks pretty good with: Todd Friesen a.k.a. Oilman VP at Visible Technologies; Rebecca Kelley, Internet Marketing Consultant from SEOmoz; Carolyn Shelby SEO Consultant and Host of SEO101; Tony Adam, a SEO Manager for Yahoo! and myself.

We’ll be talking about practical “use it now” advice for startups that want to leverage search engines for marketing their new businesses.

It’s a tough competition for sessions, so we’d love to get your support with votes and comments on the session. You’ll need to register to be able to comment or vote, but it only takes a few seconds and there is not follow up email or mailing list. If you have specific feedback on the session topic, please drop a note on the SXSW Panel picker page for this session and of course, feel free to vote 5 stars.

For Online Marketing Blog readers that are interested in Online Reputation Management and Social Media Monitoring, there’s another session that we’d love to get your vote love and feeback on: “Corporate Reputation Management in the 2.0 World” with Rob Key, CEO of Converseon and myself. Rob has been presenting on search engine reputation management since I started attending conferences – definitely one of the original thought leaders on the topic.

I am deeply humbled by being asked to join in and it should be an excellent session focusing on data mining, social media engagement and strategic approaches to reputation management and not so much on SERPs displacement as is more common in the SEO world. Please share your votes and comments on that session here.

Voting for all sessions on the SXSW Panel Picker is open until August 29th.

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