4 Comments

Call off the Cops and Get the Undertaker Instead

Jun 16, 2007
by

This is probably a good title for the sequel to “We Made a Mistake. Send the Cops.” if it were a fictitious movie made in Hollywood. Unfortunately, it is not, but the reality.

Yahoo’s response to the whole thing on May 18, 2007 was the following.

This communication is to inform you that Yahoo! will be terminating our affiliate relationship. We believe that in recent public statements you intentionally distorted facts and we have no desire to partner with affiliates who publish fabricated information about our program CJ’s Program Quality team regularly monitors our program for fraud and abuse.

In this case, CJ believed they had found a violation and contacted you directly. If you had any issues with this email you could have contacted me to resolve the problem but instead you chose to make this a public matter. This is not the sort of behavior we expect from a trusted partner.

Your Yahoo! Affiliate Program Terms will set to expire in 7 days.

Time passed and with it the program. The termination became effective on May 25, 2007. I tried to communicate and left doors open to clear the whole thing up for 4 weeks. This week I ran out of patience.

I do not want to repeat everything what I posted today at SearchEngineJournal.com, where it all started on April 8, 2007. You can get the specifics there, if you like to. It boils down to the fact that the bug in the YSM landing page, which I reported back in April and notified Yahoo! about, is not fixed to this day and that my affiliation with Yahoo! has been terminated because of it. I would like to say; “You are welcome”, but I do not believe it to be appropriate.

I do not get it. Okay, YSM made a mistake, the Yahoo! affiliate marketing team made a mistake, the CJ Program Quality made a mistake, fine, it happens. I hope the responsible departments learned a lesson from it and took action to prevent things like that to happen again.

However, why does it continue with zero action of the CJ partner management team and Yahoo! acting unprofessional like an upset child who was caught doing something wrong and lectured?

CJ never got an A+ for customer service, except from a few premium vantage level advertisers and a handful affiliates maybe. They are aware of that.

I got this impression from multiple phone calls I had with a number of people at CJ. They also want to improve on that.

For trying, to improve on that for such at least 6 months and longer, is the result very poor, IMO. I would give it a “D” if we were in school, for the efforts so far too.

You are getting infamous for dropping balls, if you continue this like you did your promising web services project, which continue to evolve since last September how much? Exactly!

If you want to learn how to do it right, do not look far. Katie Lerch and Drew Thorne-Thomsen who are responsible for the Microsoft program do it right, kudos to them, because they deserve it. It is not true to say that everything that CJ does and everybody at CJ is bad or something like that. I want to make that clear.

The Yahoo affiliate manager was more disappointing. I had contact with her before CJU last September, met her at CJU and had email communication plenty of times before. She also initially responded adequately when I reported the bug in their landing page in April, but then dropped the ball for unknown reasons.

Did she get some criticism from within Yahoo!, after my ReveNews.com post? Did this upset her to take it out personally on me, believing that it is completely my fault? I honestly do not know. It seems like it, because I am unable to explain the behavior with rational reasoning.

The use of reason and straight forward and honest communication is not that hard. Trust me. Letting go of old bad habits and procedures is. I hope my posts will help you with that. It is not time to clap each other on the shoulders. That will probably take a while longer, if you are serious about opening up and engaging with the people that at the end of the day are the ones who pay your bills.

On a Personal Note
This is my 100th post at ReveNews.com. I wanted to make it something special and nice. That was unfortunately not possible and I did not want to come up with some bogus stuff, just because of it. Maybe it is good that way, because it is a reminder that this industry has still a long way to go to reach maturity.

*baby photograph by marieta pide pan
Image Source: Wikipedia Commons.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0

About Carsten Cumbrowski

Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur and Blogger. To learn more about me and what I am doing, visit my website and check out the “about” section.

Twitter: ccumbrowski
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing
  • http://schaafco.com Brook Schaaf

    Always sorry to hear about issues like this. I can imagine it’s been very frustrating for you. A couple of thoughs worth mentioning:
    * Right or wrong, CJ and all other networks are beholden to the advertiser and always will be as long as they pay the bills.
    * Often, affiliate managers receive directives or pressure from higher-ups with regards to this sort of thing, particularly when publicity is involved.

  • http://www.cumbrowski.com Carsten Cumbrowski

    That is true Brook, but that is not the point. I am working on a post, which shows the complete opposite of this incident.

    The funny thing is that it is also involving CJ. I mentioned it briefly in this post already, but thought that it is probably a good idea to make it a separate post.

    Posting about issues or just neutral reporting news is easy and done often. Showing good things unfortunately not. It should be easy you might think, but people often think that they can take it for granted. It’s not and you should appreciate it.

    It’s Managers 101 to motivate employees, but the same principles apply to partnerships like in affiliate marketing.

  • http://www.cumbrowski.com Carsten Cumbrowski

    Finished it :) . See here.

  • http://www.revenews.com/carstencumbrowski/2007/06/communication_and_assuming_goo.html ReveNews – Carsten Cumbrowski

    Communication and Assuming Good Faith

    The incident with CJ and the Yahoo affiliate program I posted about this Friday is a good example for bad communication and a common mistake in affiliate relationships. It happens every day and a lot good partnerships unfortunately break as…