White paper

0 Email , Salesforce.com's buy of Jigsaw is the latest, most indicative market mover in the transition to a lead generation economy. Twitter's forays into a sponsored tweets business model announced last week at Chirp is another. Yahoo selling its soul to Microsoft for Bing is another. And just about everything that Google does is but another. And everything that Facebook does? Ditto. Apple loves the idea, one download at a time. Amazon? One purchase at a time. These players are poised to grease the skids leading to a lead generation economy, one that makes conventional and current online advertising no more relevant than rabbit ear antennas for the top of your black and white television. Only a year into the data-driven decade, and the ways in which user-, buyer- and social-interactions are rapidly being brought to bear on B2C and B2B commerce are piling up -- as never before. The model makes especially good sense for B2B, as these decisions are more often data- and information-driven, not emotionally charged as the advertising-juiced B2C domain so often is. And more and more B2B purchases start and end with an online search.