Do you own a Smartphone? Email, text, IM clients/ colleuges from anywhere at anytime? Check out these 8 rules to Smartphone etiquette and see how badly you are misbehaving.

1. Be considerate: If you are contacting a client after hours ask if they are free to talk. Just because your friends may immediately respond to IM’s or texts doesn’t mean your client wants to. Have the same expectations as you would from an email correspondence.

2. Remember the concept of “business hours”: Follow the weekday 7am-9pm rule. Not everyone wants to speak to you late night or on weekends, you must respect that.

3. Only contact the people you talk to regularly: Texting a colleague that sits next to you is totally acceptable. Texting a client you rarely speak to is not.

4. Put your phone away during face-to-face meetings: There is nothing more annoying then having a conversation with someone who is constantly checking their cell phone. If you can’t focus during a 30min meeting what kind of impression does that give your potential clients.

5. Texts and IMs should be reserved for simple, non-critical topics: If your texts is longer then a sentence or requires deeper communication send an email or schedule a call.

6. Be wary of abbreviations and emoticons: Be aware of whom you are texting, if you would not include LOL or a smiley face in an email to them why would you via text message.

7. Never send sensitive information: Hackers can easily obtain this information and cause severe damage.

8. Stay professional: Be sure to still use spell check and write professionally via text as you would by email. Remember you are still conducting business.

The US may not hold the world record for fastest texting any longer. Melissa Thompson from Salford, England has just broken the record for fastest typing on a phone using the sentence,

“The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.”.

The previous Guinness World Record was held by Franklin Page from Seattle with a text speed of 35.45 seconds. If approved by Guinness, Thompson will hold the new record for texting the sentence the most quickly in 29.54 seconds. Although she says she has slowed down, Thompson accredits her texting abilities to writing her boyfriend 40-50 times a day. Clearly, she’s had quite a bit of practice.

Can you text the above sentence used by Guinness Records in less than the current record time? Being on the internet so often, I’m almost willing to bet some of the people here at Leadpile could!

Texting, emailing, posting on social networks has all been made so much easier and more accessible with the use of Smartphones. Smartphones have made it possible to keep in constant contact without actually having to pick up the phone and speaking to anyone.
According to webpronews.com, there have been increases in people using Smartphone technology to search for local products and services. A recent study showed a large volume of consumers searching in their local areas for movies, restaurants, bars and a smaller volume of people searching for physical items that need to be shipped. Also shown by studies on Smartphone use is it was shown that using mobile devices for viewing or sending video has increased as well as watching or purchasing TV programs and music videos.
Being without your Smartphone can immediately make you feel like you’re lost. Loosing the gateway to instant Internet, email and social media can not only effect your social life, but in today’s world is something than many of us rely on for business as well! Leadpile appreciates the Smartphones, and what it helps us as a company accomplish when everyone is not in front of a computer. What will they come up with next????

95 percent of college students between the age of 18-24 use some form of social networking. That is defiantly not a surprising statistic. What is more surprising is that the students who are involved in using social networking tools, which includes texting and instant messaging, are more apt to learn. This is because many of the students are using the different social networking tools to network with their teachers/classmates for academic help. It makes for a quick and easy way to get the answers or information that a student needs. This could help increase the performance of the students because they have all their resources right at their fingertips.
I know when I was in college a few years ago, I found texting and social networking tools such as Facebook, to be a huge help. Not only with talking to my teachers on chat, but talking to other students as well. It was a great way to get informed on a class that I may have missed, so that I did not fall behind. It was also extremely helpful for online classes because you can get into chats and discuss as a group what is going on in the class and hear different perceptions on a single topic.
Online classes and community college is also a great way to advance yourself. Everyday LeadPile matches people who are interested in advancing their degree with the right college program. By taking online classes and using some forms of social media, being involved in your studies may be much more beneficial than you may have thought.

Have you ever received a coupon or incentive via email and then forget about it or lost track of it because you didn’t print it right away? Good news! JCPenny has selected a handful of it’s stores to test mobile coupons.
According to ONLINE MEDIA DAILY, 16 JCPenny locations installed “2D” capable scanners at registers that have the capability to read the barcode off the coupon directly from consumer’s cell phones with email capabilities. Customers can download a free application at cellfire.com/jcpenney or by texting “JCP” to 28888 from their cell phone.
JCpenny will be promoting several different incentives to test this during the holiday season. Pending the results of this trial, JCPenny will possibly expand this feature to additional stores.
“Ten million digital coupons were redeemed in the first six months of 2009, up 25% from a year ago.” For the high percentage of Blackberry and iPhone users that have their phones within reach every moment of the day, this could be potentially a great new thing! The incentive to use the coupon could be much greater given that printing, saving, and finding the coupon could be a thing of the past!