Lead Confidential

Archive for September, 2009
TweetBait – Not Watching Your Brand? Someone Else Is.

September 29th, 2009

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Like many, I have multiple Twitter accounts, one for my person / personal brand @jayweintraub and one for LeadsCon, @leadscon. Because I manage two users, in effect two brands, you can’t do it through the Twitter.com (easily). So, at the recommendation of a friend, I’ve been using Splitweet, which for the most part does exactly what I need – a way to view my accounts together. One of the keys in doing so means tracking my brands’ mentions, without having to perform a search or subscribe to #LeasdCon, for example, since not everyone tags their LeadsCon posts as such.

LeadsCon has a small number of followers, and not surprisingly, it generates almost all of its activity, around the time of the event. Going through those tweets, though, a few started to stand out. Happy as I was to see the additional volume, they just didn’t make enough sense. Here is one such tweet:

It wasn’t until a few started appearing that I began to get curious. Here’s a snapshot of them in context.

You most likely noticed two from different users with the exact same text but without the re-tweet. Again, for those not familiar with the event, it would seem a normal thing to say. Except as the brand owner, I know it isn’t. That comment was four months too late, but it’s not the tardiness of the context that is the real problem. The link being promoted is. Having been in the performance marketing, online customer acquisition space for quite some time, I am used to seeing crafty affiliate tactics. This ranks up there. A click on the link takes you to a business, just not one relevant to the conference goer, unless we are talking about what a conference goer does on their personal time. Yes, you guessed it. The link goes to an adult dating site – XXXBlackbook.

Like a webmail account, signing up for a Twitter account is a frictionless process. That’ makes deciding the real users from the fake that much harder. A click on one of the profiles above doesn’t go to a blank page with no friends/followers and zero tweets. It goes to a page resembling an active user at first glance. And, while it might seem like a manual process, those doing this type of spam have it all automated, from the signups to the followers to the tweets. And, while you can rid the system of spam, you can’t rid it of human nature. Hard to say if this will become a chronic problem, something akin to Google developing Quality Score, or simply a passing fad. Having finally made Twitter a part of my business, and increasingly valuable part, I hope they can squash this sooner than later. With the upcoming $100 million investment and increasing omnipresence, something tells me they will.

General Thoughts, Marketing Strategies

Tags: twitter spam
Personal Finance Site Mint.com Acquired for $170mm

September 15th, 2009

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For avid readers of TechCrunch, Mint.com is practically a household name, a “Silicon Valley darling” says The Alarm Clock. We have long been a fan and were fortunate enough to have them present at the inaugural LeadsCon Las Vegas 2008. News of their acquisition broke on the evening of September 13 with a rumor that financial software giant Intuit had come to an agreement. In less than 24 hours, Aaron Patzer, CEO of Mint.com had authored a guest post on TechCrunch confirming the speculation while giving both a great overview of their story and a definite nod to TechCrunch50, an event where startups pay to present for exposure to the tech community. It was Mint’s official coming out party two years ago.

Mint.com epitomizes Web 2.0 in almost all ways – it has a slick interface, transformed once desktop software only functionality to the web, raised a bunch of money, and had a quick exit (three years from inception to sale). Best of all though, despite some of the sizzle that seems mandatory for any Silicon Valley startup of this era, they created a really great interface and exceptional user experience. And, they have managed what would have seemed an impossible feat years ago – getting hundreds of thousands of users to share their most personal information – credit card passwords, bank passwords, brokerage accounts, and more. Also important to their success is that Mint didn’t actually create the underlying technology they use to suck in the data from one’s financial institutions. They did make a better mousetrap with that data.

(Screen shot of unique visitor growth over the past year. Click for larger image.)

We see Mint as not just a Valley success story but a win for customer acquisition done the right way. Mint could have chosen many different revenue models, and with the amount of data they had access to, it would not have been hard for them to enter into some highly lucrative but potentially gray areas of monetization. Instead, they chose something quite unexpected – a pure pay for performance approach. Mint received payment when users converted on one of their recommended offers, e.g., by analyzing one’s savings account, they might suggest another with a higher APR. Mint deserves praise for avoiding the monetization temptation trap of suggesting offers that are better for them than the consumer. Were they a self-funded company, they might have.

It’s also a win for performance-based online customer acquisition as to date, the vast majority of stories have come from very different types of business. As we wrote recently, in the online lead generation / customer acquisition world, three models exist, Arbitrage/Direct Marketing, Platform, or Brand Building (owning the customer one’s self). Here is what we said on trying to build a brand:

The premise sounds easy enough – create a compelling consumer proposition such that users choose to visit your site. They either hear about you through PR / friends, or they find it through organic search results. While many companies own well ranked organic sites, Quinstreet chief among them, what differentiates that SEO approach from the brand approach is the investment in recall, in building a service that users don’t just use once but come back to time again. Among contenders, BillShrink has had the most high profile attention (hard to beat inclusion in a national T-Mobile commercial), but none can yet claim victory for the approach. If lead generation is in the second inning, then the brand approach is just getting drafted. Like the disclosure of earnings by Quinstreet, that companies like these exist is a boon to the long-term future of online customer acquisition, because it signals investor’s willingness to embrace the sector and a real focus on the user.

Saying “no one can claim victory” has just become, one can claim victory for the approach. In the Valley, $170mm might not be a big enough win for some investors, but it’s a great start for better business online.

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The Affiliate Conundrum – Partner vs. Pilferer

September 8th, 2009

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There is a topic for which I am unusually passionate. It is a distinction that to many even inside the world of internet advertising means little, yet it explains the difference between so much of what we see online today – that of affiliate vs. arbitrager. As I wrote previously, “At its most essential, the affiliate has an audience they try to which they cater, where as the arbitrager has only traffic. The true affiliate has their own site, their own brand in which they’ve invested time, money, and ego. They have something to lose if they mess-up. They can’t just fold-up shop and start again. The arbitrager on the other hand is the day trader who at the extreme is ephemeral, defined by his appearing and then disappearing act.” The fake blog fiasco which has culminated in lawsuits against 500 individuals and companies and will result in countless more when the FTC investigations become public has seen its fair share of blame thrown at affiliates, but the true culprit is the arbitrage. When people take financial risk and make decisions purely based on the need to recover costs and then some, that leads to behavioral detrimental to advertisers and the marketers.

Arbitrage isn’t all bad and those who perform arbitrage, from a small search affiliate up to the venture-back technology powerhouse Adchemy, can do it such a way that it adds value throughout the entire value chain – from end user to end buyer of the lead. Arbitrage in lead generation is such a tricky topic, though, that the turning on the affiliate tap must happen with great care. While it should be the traffic driver’s responsibility to ensure that the advertiser’s best interest are kept in mind, what we continue to see is that self-interest takes precedence and that means the advertiser must do the same. The buyer must be an informed buyer and understand the traffic side of the equation.

Let’s look at particularly interesting example that highlights:
1. The affiliate challenge – how do you find third-parties that will drive quality consumers. How do you find a partner that understands your business objectives and do not just what they say they will but in good judgment.
2. The need for informed buyers – one who enters with an understanding of what they will and won’t accept along with a target cost per acquisition. It also means a buyer that has in place the means to follow-up with leads, the ability to track the performance of leads, and communicates back to the affiliate the performance on as granular level as possible.
3. The difference between those a partner and liability – everyone in the value chain wants to make money, but when it gets of alignment, no one wins; unlike a car, where it’s easy to tell when alignment isn’t there, it’s not always as easy when profit is involved.
This example comes from a recent post from famed affiliate-marketing rabble-rouser Jeremy “Shoemoney” Shoemaker, titled “Cashing in on Cash For Clunker With MySpace.” The reader of his very well trafficked blog (and quasi-online community) readers contain a large number of those hoping to glean the secrets to making money online. It’s a very different audience than one would find at LeadCon, for instance. This example caught my attention because it dealt 100% with lead generation. In short, Jeremy knew a local Omaha Nebraska Chevrolet dealer who already had a sales team handling internet leads and crafted an agreement to sell them leads at $10 a piece. As he writes, “I told them I would charge them $10 per internet lead (a small fraction of what they are currently paying) but with the condition I could publish a lot of the data on my case study (what your reading). I also told them I wanted to exclusively use MySpace for this test because in past ones we mainly focused on Facebook for driving social network traffic. ”

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General Thoughts, Lead Gen 101