In my most recent blog about the California governor candidates, I pointed out that there is an inverse relationship between marketing spend and Internet “success.” Witness Meg Whitman’s $900,000 investment in Internet marketing and the poor results she’s garnered with Facebook “Fans” and Twitter “Followers” compared to her rivals, Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown.

Joint ventures in this case made a lot of sense. From an offline perspective, it certainly did not hurt Gavin Newsom to get an endorsement from the hugely popular Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton likely pushed Mr. Newsom’s acceptance level in this political battle by several percentage points.

In fact, Mr. Newsom has some 58,000 fans to Ms. Whitman’s 4,500. What is not so obvious, though, are the online joint ventures he created to drive his popularity into the stratosphere … including his one million plus Twitter followers. While it’s possible to grow ones followers and fans organically, it generally takes a lot of time to create that many followers.

Let’s flip the analysis. Over the last several months, I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of celebrity personalities. A common theme always seems to pop up, “doing great, but would like to do better.” This, by the way, is what makes America great … striving for improvement … not just sitting around being happy with the status quo.

When evaluating joint ventures it’s always a great idea to create win / win / win scenarios. Make sure you understand what each party gets out of a relationship. In addition, since these days everyone has limited financial resources and are time constrained, creating a joint venture makes a lot of sense for a very simple reason – shared risk, shared reward.

Let’s take a real example. In creating a new online marketing campaign, we have several requirements for success: testimonials, saleable products, exclusive content, a well known brand, and much more. With limited time and financial resources, the decision to build vs. buy vs. joint venture becomes glaringly obvious – joint venture for those areas where you lack resources or talent and build or buy those pieces which you can control.

Joint ventures don’t have to be complicated. In fact, the simpler they are the more likely they are to succeed. Another simple example of this is obtaining content. Imagine that you are selling timeshares. You can try to create content on your own, but it would be much easier to joint venture with a real estate company. In return for their support, you promote their timeshare inventory.

The possibilities for joint ventures are limited only by your imagination. These days the blueprint for success is to think WAY outside the box. Don’t let naysayers say that it’s never been done before. President Obama didn’t!

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Joint ventures, of course, are referred to by many different names, not the least of which includes: partnerships, strategic alliances, alliances, etc. No matter what you call it, joint ventures are designed with the intent to create more value from two or more entities than you would have with only one alone.

In my first year at Oracle, I created a joint venture between several technology companies: Oracle, Novell, Intel, Synoptics, etc. We dubbed the joint venture, TIE for The Integrated Enterprise. At the time, integrating solutions from several different technology providers was a difficult task. On top of that, one had to figure out how to train and support customers and resellers. The goal of this joint venture was to reduce the complexities of implementing cross – company technologies.

At Hewlett Packard, we launched a joint venture between Oracle and Hewlett Packard. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was blazingly hot and both companies desperately wanted to be in the space. A joint venture relationship was developed, a marketing plan was drafted, a team was assembled, revenue goals were quantified and an execution plan was launched. Both companies benefitted from this collaboration because each leveraged the others core strengths in hardware / professional services and software and support.

Another example of a joint venture in the music industry was when MySpace inked relationships with the big music labels. The result of this venture was to create a new MySpace Music entity where the labels gave streaming and downloading rights to this new entity. The goal of the joint venture is shared advertising revenue, which of course, with 100s of millions of users is an advertiser’s playground.

So, what does the new world of online marketing and profit systems look like? In this new era of Internet and mobile marketing, affiliates rule the playground. The affiliates and, even more so, the super affiliates are the power brokers. Joint ventures are common in this business and move at the speed of, well, the digital network. Those who understand how to work with affiliates will see a multiplicative effect of their marketing dollars.

Joint venture brokers are also gaining in popularity. These are “brokers” who can marry the super affiliates to companies who are looking to jump start their online businesses. This is no trivial pursuit, as it requires, just like in the “offline” world, a strong product, a huge market, a business plan and lots of diplomacy and tact.

Joint ventures can be a great way to accelerate sales, as well as to reduce the complexities of going it alone.

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