The concept blew me away. I loved it of course, as a web marketer. I've never bothered buying email lists for email marketing, just used client's in-house lists. I never felt renting a list from companies where you never really knew where it came from was a good or ethical idea. Now a days who needs more SPAM? We're all inundated. Beyond not guaranteeing me who my audience is, so I can properly email market, renting a list is only giving me access to those contacts through one method - email. What if I want to multi-channel market -a email campaign, followed up by direct mail, then a cold call? What if I want to do mutliple email campaigns to the same list? I'd have to pay every time to send.

Enter Jigsaw.com, curtain left. Jigsaw.com is a virtual business card swap - for every 1 contact you upload, you gain access to 1 contact on the site. You can also pay to just get contacts. The first thing I thought was, "Awesome, but what about data accuracy? What makes this any better than buying leads from companies like Hoovers or renting an email list?" Those were always the issues that prevented me from working with email lists and lead companies. They say they have accurate data, MOST claiming the most accurate. With Jigsaw, it is a self-correcting system. With a member base of over 350,000, when someone takes contacts, be it 5 or 100, they flag any contacts they have received that are inaccurate into the system. The Jigsaw system, in turn, credits them back that contact. That credit can then be used to get another contact. Meanwhile, whomever had submitted the innacurate data loses points from their account if it was recently added or updated by them. Pretty novel, huh?

Such a simple concept, but it is shaking up the entire email lists and business lead market, from the ground up. Jigsaw.com just started a product called Jigsaw Lists in late Fall 2007, designed for companies looking to just purchase data. Cost per contact is $1 each.

So here's the controversy - what about one's right to privacy? Jigsaw's stance is that what's on your business card is public information. You pass it out to strangers and therefore the data is free for anyone to use in whichever way they choose. You can imagine privacy activists opinion on this - not good, to say the least. Myself, I'm for it of course, as a marketer. It's only going to get more sophisticated, the way we market. Social networking is moving beyond a bunch of teenagers linking together who their friends are, people are growing up and starting to figure out that there are many many more productive uses of it. This is just one small step towards that.