Lukewarm Calling
Kevin Newcomb over at ClickZ has a nice writeup of a partnership agreement between Jambo, a pay per call provider and Infospace, a leading local search company.
Jambo, formed by some ex-Netzero executives, raised $5m last week to compete with Ingenio and blaze the pay per call frontier.
They have a network similar to Ingenio as well. But they plan to offer call tracking on all results and as the network generates calls from merchants, follow up with an introduction. Or Lukewarm calling, as I’ll term it. We are planning a similar sales rollout with Homethinking (a preview of which should be out in the next month or so, by the way).
Jambo might have a difficult time managing what the whisper will be (will it be Jambo or the network partner, for example, Infospace, that is whispered to the merchant as the call is being connected?).
The notion of ‘organic’ calls is a good one though (in my heavily biased opinion, of course). As the cost of tracking falls (Jambo’s entry and others in the near future will inevitably force the price down like in any analytics technology market) and VoIP driving the cost of carriage toward zero, that becomes feasible. In the meantime, I’m taking the view that it is great marketing spending. Proving the value and credibility of your service to prospective advertisers is money well spent. And just a little less evil than cold calling 
