Rice’s Riffs

Keith Burwell and I will be in California most of next week and we would love the opportunity to get everyone (lenders, lead providers, etc.) together for dinner.
Any suggestions for good places to gather?
Here is the tentative schedule:

San Diego: Wednesday, 10/24, 6:00 pm UPDATE: Morton’s Steakhouse
Los Angeles: Thursday, 10/25, 7:00 pm UPDATE: The Cannery

If you [...]

There has been a lot of discussion about Internet lead quality declining. Is it the marketing or the market? I believe it has a lot to do with consumers reacting to the media and the market.
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LeadPoint announces the launch of education leads within it’s unique lead exchange model. Not particularly interesting in and of itself, but there does seem to be the hint of something different:
…service that it says allows online and campus-based educational institutions to purchase leads submitted by students that have the highest likelihood of matching each school’s [...]

As the mortgage market tightens, lead generation companies begin to mount tactical offensive and defensive strategies to position for dwindling Internet originating mortgage companies.
A a recent article by Inman News, "Lead quality a two-sided coin" and commentary from LeadCritic about price increases and my review of the LendingTree Partner Summit seems to have tipped [...]

Where is the next lead generation frontier? I think it is becoming increasingly clear that getting local should be in your strategic plan if you are in the lead generation business. Mike Sachoff, of www.webpronews.com points out the glaring opportunity:

The dollar gap between U.S. local online spending and total local media ad spending is [...]

The debate continues, but increasingly the data seems to support a shift to online advertising; yielding an increase in overall online advertising spend.

“If marketing budgets shrink, and they are often the first to be cut in a downturn, digital will still continue to grow,” said Eric Bader, managing director of digital at MediaVest.
“The focus will [...]

I have been ranting about content and community in lead generation for months now, but the message often gets me skepticism at best and a confused glazed look at worst.
However, I think I may have stumbled on an enlightening analysis for my point: Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion in his analysis of "Why Some Web [...]

Adding to my argument for sustainable growth in the online lead generation market…
If you agree with my premise that advertisers are increasingly demanding a shift from CPM to ROI as the effective marketing metric. Then it seems that the Internet Advertising Bureau may have the most compelling statistics:

"The Interactive Advertising Bureau says Internet advertising is [...]

Time to jump into the fray. The last couple of weeks a discussion has been frothing over the effects of the mortgage market chaos on online advertising.
Jerry Neumann started me thinking about what might happen to lead generation in the changing mortgage market, why some arguments seem counterintuitive, and past data in other similar markets [...]

While the media and the market is focused on mortgage meltdowns, downgrading online Ad companies, and maybe even pitch-forking a few lead generation companies a few smart people (notice, I added myself–hey, it is my blog there must be a bit of ego in me) are thinking about building a better lead generation mouse trap:

Jerry [...]