I’ve given heat to online poker sites that miss the mark using social media and it’s time to do it again. bwin recently made some rather major changes to their affiliates program. The response from the affiliate community has been less than enthusiastic.
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One of the biggest issues, which I agree with, is that the new terms apply retroactively. You enter into one agreement with bwin and then if they decide to change the terms of the agreement they should be able to but they should grandfather your previous players who you signed up under the original agreement.
But why they’ve earned a post here is that they set up a Facebook fan page for the bwinners affiliate program. As you can see below, it’s not exactly selling the product.
This highlights another problem many online poker sites make when trying to use social media. If you can’t or won’t staff your social media group properly don’t even bother launching it.
What normally happens is someone hears about this Facebook or Twitter thingy and they tell someone to go set up an account. It’ll be great for marketing because it’s free!!!!! And someone, who is usually already overworked, sets up the social media site and then they only post on it when someone asks them to.
Of course, nobody thinks about who will man the social media outlets when they do something controversial or there’s some sort of scandal so they either let the inmates run the asylum (like bwin appears to have done here) or they send someone in who has built up no previous cred with the community and ends up becoming the company punching bag.
Come on folks, it’s really not that hard.
About Bill Rini
Bill Rini has been working in the online poker industry since 2004. He was a product manager for poker at Full Tilt and was the poker room manager at PartyPoker.
Bill has been blogging about online poker since 2003 and is considered one of the leading authorities on the online poker industry.
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
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Bill Rini
Yes, apparently they closed that FB page down. LOL. They really don’t get social media at all :-)
Tamas
I couldn’t find the bewinners facebook page? only found an new page with 5 fans?
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bewinnerscom-bwin-affiliate-community/168177233207702
rather odd poll questions…
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Luke Thomas
I’d agree that the larger affiliate accounts have terms all of their own and I understand it’s simply a way for them to make more money. Thing is if they are treating their affiliates that way, no matter how small it’s a testament as to how they treat all their customers. Plane and simple, just bad business.
I didn’t even address the Facebook page as that goes without saying sheeeeshh.
ND poker
Hi, im a new reader. You should have mentioned the http://belosers.com site :) It’s all about bwin terms and conditions on the new predatory affiliate system :)
Bill Rini
I think they care. They just want to make money on their poker since they’re losing players and it’s costing them more to acquire new ones. One way of lowering the costs of acquiring players is to change the terms on the affiliates.
But the reality is that I highly doubt that the largest affiliates will experience any of these new policies. But smaller affiliates, who always overestimate how valuable they are, will get screwed.
Poker
So now what? I mean really? Bwin doesn’t care about the folks supporting them but are the people supporting them really going to stop supporting them? It seems to me like a one sided relationship.
Ben
haha, very good bill.