A key benefit of Web 2.0 is how it increasingly provides new ways for people to connect and stay connected. Now days, nearly everyone has a Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn account. A Web 2.0 service that has recently generated strong adoption within LeadPoint is Twitter.

The benefit of Twitter is that it provides real-time short messaging services enabling users to share with one another what they are doing at any given moment. Another way to think of Twitter is as an instant message shared with the world (or more specifically with those who want to follow what you’re doing). Twitter limits messages to 140 characters in length and can be sent and received through mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

Within LeadPoint there is debate as to Twitters value. Not everyone feels the need to hear what their friends/associates are doing “i.e. in spread sheet hell, off to the gym, or watching rain fall against [their] window.” Still, the ability of Twitter to successfully reach a large number of people with immediate updates clearly has useful applications.

A recent L.A. Times tech blog noted a site called Tweet Congress that allows users to search House representatives and Senators by name or location that utilize Twitter. In the article it noted an interesting statistic that Republican legislators outnumbered Democrats almost two-to-one. While LeadPoint doesn’t make political stances, we cannot deny (nor can Democrats) Republican’s historical success at grassroots communications over the last 10 years. The fact that they are embracing Twitter appears to validate its potential usefulness in some measure at reaching and organizing people quickly.

Innovation is a key value of LeadPoint’s culture. We constantly look for ways to improve processes to provide better service to our partners as well as ways to better communicate our offerings. In our view, Twitter provides a useful way to keep partners abreast of all the cool things we can help them with.

Recognizing that not all our partners will be able to attend the upcoming LeadsCon conference, LeadPoint plans to use Twitter to keep those who follow us informed of all the innovative discussions that are occurring by alerting you to blogs we write on panel discussions we feel particularly relevant. That way, even if you are unable to attend the conference, you can benefit from the thought provoking conference discussions that occur.

To sign up for our Twitter feed, create an account at www.twitter.com. Search for “leadpoint” and add us to those you follow.

One of the fastest growing departments within LeadPoint is our United Kingdom division. One of the benefits that our UK cousins have is the fact that lead generation is still in its infancy in the UK compared with the US. This can be both a benefit and an obstacle.

As in the United States, the lead generation pitch makes a lot of sense – reach prospective customers, buy the results of somebody else’s marketing spend, and speak to prospective customers within moments of their requesting to be contacted.

Our UK office felt marketing such a concept to a new market would be a slam dunk and that prospective partners would be lining up around the corner to buy leads.

As evidenced by their 300% growth in 2008, the reception of lead gen in the UK has been strong. However, as is generally the case, success does not come without challenges. Despite our UK team’s best efforts, they were not always able to communicate the value of how lead generation and technology are interlinked.

In the US where work shuts down if the Internet should happen to go down and many of us cannot fathom life without a Blackberry, it appears that the need for technology in the UK (at least in some business sectors) is not as pervasive as in the US.

In one instance our UK office was contacted by a prospective buyer who read in the press about the merits of lead generation and was excited at the prospect of buying them. Unfortunately, the gentleman did not have an email address to receive leads, nor a computer for that matter.

When trying to explain how online lead generation and owning a computer go together like the British summer and rain, he promptly told our sales person that he didn’t like typing so he would not be changing his working practices any time soon.

Our UK office assumed that this was just an isolated incident. Apparently this wasn’t the case. Not long afterwards, another prospective customer contacted them who also did not have a computer. However, this gentleman did not see the lack of a computer as an obstruction to buying Internet generated leads. Instead, he came up with the solution that our UK office should just call him every time he received a lead and read him the lead detail over the phone. He could then just copy the information down himself.

Despite such setbacks, lead generation is continuing to grow in popularity in the UK as it has in the US as word of its value spreads. We congratulate our UK office for their 2008 success and look forward to a successful 2009.

For those of you unfamiliar with Kaizen 改善, it’s a Japanese philosophy focused on continuous improvement. It’s a philosophy that LeadPoint embraces as part of a continued effort to enhance the quality of leads that flow through our market. In keeping with this philosophy, over the last few months we have been improving the measurement protocols used to evaluate each lead that lead sellers submit to each LeadPoint market.  Our efforts were rewarded with some eye opening results.

Online lead generation is inherently a numbers game. Visitors click on an ad. Some of them fill out the form. Others leave. Some visitors convert to actual sales and others don’t provide their real phone numbers. This disparity is the backbone of lead gen.

Some sources have always provided better results than others. We’ve worked diligently to improve our ability to grade leads and sellers effectively.  We’ve learned a lot, some of which we suspected all along and some of which surprised us greatly.  The most shocking discovery was the level of energy some companies will exert to commit what is best described as nothing other than egregious fraud. Our new market monitoring processes have allowed us to quickly identify and remove these bad actors and to refund affected lead buyer funds in a timely fashion.

As a by-product of our efforts and innovations, we have been able to ensure that both valued constituents of our marketplaces can continue to thrive. Our lead buyers can buy with the assurance that they are purchasing a “top shelf” product that yields industry leading conversion metrics. This renewal of confidence in the market resulted in our trusted, quality marketing partners once again capturing top returns on their marketing dollars.

Standing at the doorstep of an exciting 2009, LeadPoint reaffirms its pledge to practice a quality focused Kaizen in our pursuit of attaining market Nirvana, a trading platform where both sides of the model achieve a state of blissful return on investment.