Leadpile’s Blog

Facebook is the largest social networking site out there. Whether you are looking so see what your friends are doing, finding old classmates, or just trying to stay connected, Facebook seems to have it all. All except Twitter that is.
When Facebook failed to acquire Twitter.com in the fall of 2008 they decided to do the next best thing and try to be more like them. Within the past week Facebook launched Facebook Lite, which essentially works in the same manner as Twitter. Facebook Lite took out all the frills so a user can only post their status updates. This is a great way to get more people to the site who are looking for a simple way to follow what their friends or favorite businesses are doing.
Facebook has also made it so people who already have Facebook can simply “Tag” a friend and then begin to follow them. This will eliminate the need to juggle between two Facebook accounts. Facebook really did their homework when they decided to start to have some of the same features as Twitter. They even decided to copy the “@” that one puts in front of a name when someone “Tweets” to someone else. So it looks like Facebook didn’t do their homework, but just copy off the person next to them.

One of the newest forms of advertising is mobile adverting/SMS marketing. Being that this form of lead generation is completely different, there has to be alternative ways to measure success. After looking into this further, Gigaom.com pointed out some valid points on how mobile advertisers can effectively track stats.

Reach

Mobile enables a closed loop functionality like no other medium. Transactions are essentially a measure of the “true” ROA. We need to measure how a campaign impacts a company’s bottom line. If the campaign doesn’t move the needle over time, it didn’t really work, but we won’t know whether or not it has without measuring.

Leadpile has seen some successful publishers generating quality leads through mobile advertising, however after reviewing some of these point, maybe there are some enhancements Leadpile and other networks need to look at implementing. How big will mobile advertising get?

Believe it or not there is a network out there promising if you pay, they can increase your Facebook friends. Does more friends really = something worth paying money for? With today’s use of social networking, I might have to say yes. According to Adage.com, as we all know Twitter and Facebook are effective marketing tools, so maybe the idea of companies really getting into this and helping others build their “friends” list, could be an effective idea. If “friends” = more money then this is certainly something I could see other marketing companies looking into doing. Nothing is free and who has time to try and generate 5000 new friends like this company says they can help you do? Great idea.. hope it works out for this company! At the present time, Leadpile will continue to build our “friends” list and Twitter “followers” little by little.

In past years, many journalist were worried about taking too many incentives to write about something specific. These days now the FTC is bringing to everyone’s attention the fact that many bloggers could be writing about something because they were receiving kickbacks. The FTC (Fair Trade Commission) is trying to make it regulated that if you are receiving any rewards for blogging about a particular subject matter, that you fully disclose this to your readers. It seems that this attempt to regulate could move into social networking sites such as Twitter too. We have all heard about one of the most “famous” bloggers – Perez Hilton, but is he being paid by someone to blog or Tweet about certain subject matters? I would think so…
In this day someone’s time and opinion really matters, so should it be wrong to be able to accept “things” in order to talk about them? In the day of regulations with insurance companies, real estate and many other industries, governing gifts received in order to render a service is against the rules. However, should this sort of thing really apply to bloggers? Leadpile likes the opportunity that a blog allows us to talk about certain hot topics and things going on in our industry, however I don’t think any sort of potential FTC regulation will affect our little blog.

How could we all not forget the YouTube Video that generated some massive buzz for Britain’s Got Talent singer Susan Boyle? She became an overnight sensation all over the world! Well move over Susan because now a new YouTube video is bringing some buzz for Microsoft. A crazy stunt type video recently came out and just seemed impossible to be true, but it generated 1.4 million + views already. After digging and digging it was discovered that this hard to believe video was in fact bogus. Some great video editing allowed this video to be made into something that looked real, but ended up being discovered that it was in fact the work of some “creative” editing. It seems that Microsoft Germany had not planned on this video getting the type of buzz it ended getting, but thanks to Twitter, YouTube users and other news outlets it did!
YouTube and other social networking sites are a great place to get some attention for your company. Leadpile uses YouTube to create a place for the social networking site’s users to learn about our company. If this is not something that you are currently not using as a source of getting your name out there, I would recommend it. Look how much attention this most recent YouTube video brought to Microsoft? The power of YouTube is priceless!

It looks like too much of a good thing is bound to feel some affects from the “bad guys”… the hackers.
Twitter was down today because of a hacker attack on the micro-blog site. It sounds like as of now the site is back up. This article also spoke about the fact that some NFL teams and our US Marine Corps are banned from using the social networking site(s)…. goes along with today’s previous blog post about ESPN cracking down on it’s use too.

Sounds like the employees of ESPN have gotten busted by the “twitter police”. ESPN has recently rolled out some new guidelines for acceptable behavior with social networking sites such as Twitter. The goal of these new guidelines was to provide guidance on how websites, blogs and social networking sites should only be used in a way to benefit ESPN.
This brings up a good point about employers and the use of these social networking sites. A couple items come to mind when I think about these guidelines being implemented. First, there are a lot of people that might occupy a lot of work time to keep their fellow “tweeters”/Facebook “friends” etc updated on their daily activities. This affects them in their jobs and performing what they are paid there to do… work not Tweet. Secondly, social networking really has not been a part of our daily lives till recently, so there has to be some sort of guidelines implemented to help control what company information/news can be funneled through the social networking sites. If there are not guidelines, then sometimes the common sense factor will not come into play when releasing possibly some private information. However, there are a lot of companies that will use Twitter as a source of promoting their product or service, and I believe that is a different conversation. Promoting your company’s product or service should be okay, but there has to be guidelines on how much time is actually done doing that while working.
Leadpile does work on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, but in a way that does not violate any information that should not be disclosed improperly. It will not surprise me if we continue to hear stories like this one, because employers are having to set a precedence on how to effectively use the social networking sites while conducting business.

Several years ago, how many of you were like me wondering what a “blog” was?? It is almost funny now for me to hear someone say…. What is a “blog”???? At this point in time, it is hard to understand how people can not at least recognize the word “blog”, with as much press that a lot of these celebrity bloggers get. Blogs have now become something for all of us to express ideas, and specifically for Leadpile the blog helps us to convey information going on in the lead generation industry. No matter what your purpose is for blogging, understand it is a great thing that evolved into something that is key to any company’s web presence.
Time.com states that blogs have been around for 15 years, however for many of us this is something that just came around. In the early stages of blogging there were a lot of at home moms that had taken up blogging as a way to supplement their income. Working with various companies and their products or services, at home moms were able to write influential information promoting these products for others to try them out. This was, and still is, a win win situation for both the at home mom who wants to be around their children, and the company that is getting their product talked about on the internet. So what could be next for blogs?
Leadpile Lead Exchange likes what can be conveyed through our blog to our readers. If your company is not utilizing a blog, then I would suggest incorporating one immediately. Besides being able to convey industry news to our advertisers and publishers, the blog allows us to have “fresh” content on our website on a regular basis. This is something that is very important to the search engines and generating that much desired traffic we are all looking for. So it seems there is really a lot of benefits with blogging, besides just a great place to say what you did last weekend. There are all levels of blogging, and it is certainly fit for just about anyone that wants to express any ideas- small or BIG! If you are lucky, you could even be a recipient of an award for having the best blog (Time Magazine has yearly awards). Got BLOG???????

Can it really be? Facebook to make billions within the next 5 years? Reuters is reporting that one of Facebook’s board members is predicting this. It seems that promoting more advertising, to really capitalize on the massive amounts of traffic frequenting the social networking site, is key. 225+ million users are on the site, so there has got to be some way to monetize this site to maybe earn these billions that are being predicted. However, will it follow the trends of Twitter where there are massive amounts of traffic not being capitalized on yet? I think the future of social networking really depends on these sites figuring out an effective way to capitalize on the users on their sites. What way(s) of monetizing the social networking site(s) will work best? What are the demographics of the Facebook? Who is coming and going on the site?
The users on Facebook seem to be a lot more diverse than the other large social networking site (myspace.com). However, where did myspace go wrong………. or did they NOT go wrong? They dominated the net just a few years ago, yet times seemed to have changed when the site became more of an advertising site than a place for people to network. Let’s keep an eye on Facebook and see if they stay on the right path to really do the right thing for their network… AND earn this BILLIONS of revenue! Maybe Facebook should contact Leadpile to do some lead generation!

It seems Microsoft sees some “good” in Twitter because it is incorporating Twitter messages into the Bing search results. They will be indexing some of the more popular “Tweeters” who have some good followers and tweets. I guess Twitter is not a one hit wonder that is just going to go away. The realtime updates of what people are doing, and talking about, is truly something everyone is trying to get a piece of. These realtime search results are going to be displayed in a separate area of the Bing results page, so people can stay in touch with the Twitter world.
You really can’t blame Microsoft for trying to capitalize on all this traffic going to Twitter. They have some nice competition in the search engine world with Google, and probably want to do anything in their power to make the new Bing search engine work, and work like no other search engine. Score for Microsoft!

Some very interesting information regarding women and what they prefer. Bizreport.com study finds that women of different age ranges are either on their PCs or their mobile phones more so than the other. This information is very important for Leadpile publishers because knowing your demographics and how to create sites effectively, will ultimately make or break your success with marketing. The study finds that women under the age of 25 tend to be more on their mobile phones, versus on the PC. Whereas women over the age of 40 tend to be more on their PCs. This means that mobile content types of sites should really be geared towards the younger age women, where the web based sites should really target the older women. If these two groups of women are spending their time on one or the other, really how does this affect publishers wanting to generate leads?
This really points out a few different things to pay attention to if you want to effectively market to women. If you are looking for various sources of advertising you might tend to be more effective with younger women if you are using things such as social networking, SMS marketing or Google Adsense on mobile applications. Your target audience would be younger and you would want to choose lead types that would work well with this demographic. However, if you are wanting to target a product/service to older women utilizing the traditional web would be the way to go.
This study really makes sense in the fact that the younger and younger generation will adapt to what is the most up to date technology, where older women are more comfortable in the PC world that they were brought up in. My guess would be if this study had included women over the age of 60, that they would tend to not have much involvement on the internet, and other sources of advertising would work better with them. Understanding what is going on with different demographics is very important as a publisher, because if you are not marketing effectively you waste time and advertising dollars. Studies such as this one is something to pay attention to and really try and understand, so we all can become effective in marketing our products and services to the right target market.

In today’s era of social networking and free email address accounts, I find this very surprising that China has chosen to ban both Hotmail and Twitter. SearchEngineWatch.com points out a good point that a third of our world’s population lives in China, therefore will this ban affect active users on both Twitter and Hotmail? It’s kinda hard to believe that something like Twitter and Hotmail can be that bad that a government would eliminate it and just throw one’s freedom of speech out the window. I guess China is maybe a little behind the times with allowing people to control their own lives, so I guess this is not totally surprising to me. I wonder how those that live in China feel about this government intervention with their lives? If you live in China, I hope you get Twitter back soon!