Leadpile’s Blog

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.

With Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn it is hard to keep up with the growing social media trends. Over the past couple of years there has been a steady incline in social media users that until recently did not appear to have any end in site.
According to Mashable “The Social Media Guide” Twitter and Facebook appear to be flattening while LinkedIn saw an increase in traffic of 5.68% for the month of September. LinkedIn also announced today that they have now reached over 50 million users. LinkedIn states that 50% of its user are currently based in the US, while 50% are international.
While Twitter and Facebook are expanding their focus and going off in many different directions to attract as many users as possible, LinkedIn has always had the same focus – to connect professionals to each other.
Personally, I have two Twitter accounts, a Facebook and a LinkedIn account…Each for a different purpose. For me, LinkedIn has become a way to stay in touch with former colleagues as well as connect with people who I would not necessarily want introduced into my personal life through pictures or comments on my Facebook or Twitter accounts.
It is all changing so quickly, and hard to keep up with! As soon as I grasp how to connect on one site, it seems like everyone has moved on to the next. Staying “trendy” with social media is a full time job, however Leadpile promises to keep up with the trends!

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.

We all have been saying this for a while…. how does Twitter make money????? Now it seems that we will all now know, because they are officially offering advertisement on their site. Companies of all natures have all been using Twitter as a way of communicating brief updates of what is going on with their world, however now Twitter can pocket some money from this sort of thing.
I have to say reading about Twitter incorporating advertisements on it’s site prompted me to go to the site to check it out. I am trying to now see what changed? Maybe I wasn’t going to the site enough before, but where are the advertisements? I was thinking I would see a bunch of ads etc on the sidebars of the site, yet I do not see any of that.

We all know the importance of the internet in all of our lives, however there are some things that will go down in history. It’s like when a baby does little steps, talks, goes to school etc, you want to know what led up to that child to become who they are today. The internet is our world’s little baby!
11 Points.com points out some very interesting facts about “our” internet:

1. The first image posted on the internet was in 1992. This image was a random picture of 4 women.
2. The first email sent was back in 1971 by a programmer named Ray Tomlinson.
3. The first spam email to go out was in 1978 by a company called DEC (which is no longer in business).
4. The first banner ad was created by AT&T in 1994.
5. The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser point in 1995.
6. The first Tweet was performed by one of the founders of Twitter back in 2006.
7. The first search engine (called Archie) was created back in 1990.
8. The first domain name registered (symbolics.com) was in 1985.
9. The first YouTube video was created in 1995.
10.The first pornographic website registered was in 1994.

No matter how involved you are in the internet today, there is a deep history involved in what happened in previous years to create what we all call the internet today. I can’t wait to see the new list of “first” in 5-10 more years……… It’s such a big beast with so MUCH more potential!

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.

With the explosive popularity of Twitter, many companies have attempted or are attempting to become players in this space.  You can now add Yahoo to the list of companies that are rolling out a strategy.

Yahoo has already developed a Portuguese and Spanish microblogging platform, and an English version is already accepting invitations to the program.  You can go here to see the new site. Reviews of the other versions have been mixed at best, so it will be interesting to see if Yahoo is spending their time and resources wisely in entering this space.

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.

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.

I don’t think there is a day that goes by where something about Twitter is not being talked about. That’s great for them, but what is it really bringing them as far as money in their pockets? It seems they are still working on long term initiatives that would help them make money off it’s popularity. However, for now they are continuing to come up with ideas that will help the current users make money. In the next few days, they will be rolling out the first phase of educational information for businesses on how they can effectively use Twitter to generate revenue for their own company (big and small). Twitter will continue to roll out educational information so they can help their users become more Twitter savvy with Tweeting. They see their site as a great tool for businesses to use to help generate revenue. Does this mean if they are going to help educate businesses on how to make money, then they must have something planned for themselves on how THEY are going to make money? I hope so!
Twitter is looking to be looked at more like a communication network, versus a social network. They have forecasted that they will have revenues of around 4 billion for the 4th quarter, but I am not sure how they will achieve that with the way the site is currently. Maybe they have something “big” up their sleeves????? Leadpile Lead Exchange uses Twitter on a limited basis, however maybe with some new tools available we could look at using it even more! Are other lead generation companies using Twitter to generate leads? I would be curious to see how affiliate marketers and other lead generation companies are utilizing this “communication network” to help their business?

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!