Leadpile’s Blog

Leadpile is very much familiar with email marketing and works with a lot of publishers that are generating traffic through this source of marketing. Because it has become so popular with companies trying to monetize data, and publishers trying to have a less expensive way to generate traffic, reading up on any new email marketing trends is important. DMNews brought up some key points about email marketing:
1. Permission and privacy: Various states are making rulings on cases that involve consumer’s information, so keeping up with not only CAN-SPAM but other legislation involving consumers privacy, is key to keeping your nose clean with the law.

2. Video in email: The next biggest thing is utilizing video in emails. If you are not someone that is utilizing this yet, you better start reading up now.

3. Partnership of email marketing and social media: Incorporating links to social media in emails is something that marketers picked up on last year, however the future of these two is going to be big. Perfecting the use of social media in email is something that all emailers will have to learn more about, because this is going to be something that is going to continue to emerge and you will need to learn to keep up with it.

“Nineteen percent of online marketing budgets are now allocated to e-mail, according MarketingSherpa, and 54% of marketers plan to increase their e-mail budgets this year, based on research from Econsultancy and ExactTarget.” If you are not a company that is looking at increasing your email marketing budget, trends show you might want to reconsider this!

The last person I would have imagined who would be an advocate of social media is the Pope. I have to say hearing this on the news briefly made me want to know more. After searching the net, it seems this story is in fact true. The Pope thinks that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is a great way to spread a message. If you are maybe a company where there is some resistance to joining the social media buzz, you might want to reevaluate that decision. PCW Magazine is saying that in the Pope’s “message”, he acknowledges the new technologies our world is having available, so one must use these resources to spread the word. I guess religious or not, you might want to take the Pope’s advice, and that is utilize social media to spread “your” word.

Twitter has made changes to make keeping up to the minute information on your friends even easier! This week Twitter gave it’s users the ability to create public or private lists keeping track of people and their latest 140 character tweets.
This new feature allows you to create your own lists of other users, while also allowing you to follow other people’s lists and view what lists you make it on to. The ability to create lists now adds an entirely new aspect to the “numbers game”.
According to SocialMediaInsider lists are another form of popularity contests through social media. “Say you’re a large company, or a smaller but tech-savvy one, with 100 people on Twitter, and these employees all add your main corporate account to 10 different lists. You’re instantly on 1,000 Twitter Lists, which for now will probably put you well in the top 1% of the most popular listed brands on Twitter. Meanwhile, if I’m on 100 lists through 50 people each adding me to two lists, and you’re on 75 lists but added by 75 different people, who’s more popular? The allure of gamesmanship over this will be short-lived. I hope.”
All of the lists, counting the number of followers you have, and tweeting things interesting enough for people to read is hard work! For LeadPile, I have a Twitter account with 99 current followers… How many of them actually are following me because they are interested in LeadPile news, or they are following me because I am following them and that’s the “twitter etiquette”, I can’t answer.

Facebook passed a remarkable figure this week.  The 200 millionth user was added this week to the popular social networking site.  If Facebook was a country it would have the fifth largest population in the world. Facebook isn’t only getting larger, it is also getting older.  People ages 26-44 make up the the fastest growing segment of the Facebook population.  

Most Facebook users are still reluctant to click on adds, and businesses are still trying to leverage the social networking space.  Real problems and perceived problems regarding products and customer service can be monitored with social media.  Great opportunities lie ahead for Facebook, Twitter and others.

While the record labels are struggling to bring in revenue, social networking sites are where many companies are turning to help save them. According to Business Week, “The record industry has been hammered in recent years by online piracy and a dearth of mega-hits, with sales sliding steadily since their peak of $14.6 billion in 1999. As CDs sales have dropped, the labels have tried repeatedly to develop digital strategies to make up the difference, and they’ve all come up short. Last year was the industry’s worst yet in terms of revenue losses. The total value of digital and traditional sales dropped 12% in 2007, to $10.4 billion, compared with a 4.4% slide the year before, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).”
Record labels are looking to utilize the internet to help this struggling industry, and why not partner up with social networking? Will MySpace Music be able to handle such a large partnership? They certainly have the audience for the record companies, but will it be used effectively? I guess we will all see how successful this partnership is, and if it works I am sure the rest of the record labels will be looking at social networking to increase sales.
Leadpile Lead Exchange works in affiliate marketing, and this sounds like another form of affiliate marketing that could also work effectively.

Social media is an area of marketing that is very popular.  Some critics say how can you do effective marketing with social media, and then you hear others say if you are not in the social media arena, you better get into it!
Many surveys that I read spoke about the effectiveness of social media sites and a common point was raised in a lot of these surveys:  consumers buy things that their peers/friends/contacts in these social networking sites also buy.  The most successful companies are using the networking sites, but ALSO creating interactive advertising that involves the people on the sites.  Conducting surveys, questionairs and other brief interactive/conversational marketing tactics.  Not only does this type of marketing get the feedback of the people, it allows companies to get some potential word of mouth advertising going.  This could be an ideal place where a company rolls out new products and gets the potential momentum for that product, even before it hits the shelves.  
Social networking sites are part of the social media craze.  Other examples of social media are blogs (like this one), social news sites and sites like youtube.  All these sites have something in common- a common place for people to express their thoughts and opinions, yet also read what others are talking about too.  How can you go wrong reading some unbiased feedback about a particular subject that you are interested in?  The old way of marketing was companies had their websites and you had to take their word everything they said on the website was actually correct.
I would say social media is something that could make or break companies.  Therefore, treating customers with the utmost respect is ideal, because if you don’t- you could be all over the next blog entries.  
On a final note, I have had a lot of conversations with prospective clients that did their homework before joining the Leadpile marketplace.  This “homework” is them visiting various social media sites and reading positive posts about the marketplace.  So THANK YOU social media!

Have you embraced Web 2.0 and all the new social media? Perhaps the time is now? Key Performance Indicator is a new buzzword emerging in connection with the elusive goal of monetizing social media. There is still a lot of confusion regarding KPI, but most agree that it will be different for every company. Obviously, in the lead generation business, leads generated would be an important KPI. There are many other very tangible KPI’s in our business. The challenge is to monetize social media, and not just chase after the latest trend.