Marketing Hipster

As most of you know, Jerry Yang co-founder of Yahoo! has taken back the reigns of Yahoo! after Terry Semel stepped down as CEO. There is a great deal of speculation of what Jerry is going to do with Yahoo!. Some of the speculation includes Rupert Murdoch selling MySpace to Yahoo! for a 25% stake in the company. Another highly talked about area is whether Yahoo! would make more money by outsourcing search to Google.

These are some HUGE questions, but before Jerry tackles anything of this magnitude, I think he needs to take a breath and focus on some basics. So I have put together my own little Jerry Yang To Do List.

Jerry, this is for you:

1. Clearly and concisely explain to his employees and share holders what is going to be his main focus for the next 30, 60 and 90 days. Not some high level BS, but be specific. State what you want to do and then come back and communicate what you have found and what you believe it means at the end of each time period.
2. Once you have done your initial exploration, again communicate both internally and externally what direction the company is going in. If you are going to be a content player then state how you are going to do this. What changes will be made immediately and what your expectations are.
3. After you have stated what your vision is and where the company is going, make sure that every employee, manager and director are proceeding down the road that you just mapped out. I have several colleagues who work for Yahoo! and bar none their biggest complaint is the lack of communication and understanding throughout the company. No-one works on an island, define where everyone needs to go and then make sure it is enforced on every level.
4. Begin reaching out to the people most important to you – your users. Begin a conversation, start actually wanting feedback and even more importantly, when you get feedback, do something with that feedback. Make changes, send responses, start showing that under your new regime, Yahoo! is going to get back to focusing on your customers, the people who come to your site each and everyday.
5. Start kicking people in the ass! Yahoo! needs to get back to start up mode and regain that sense of urgency that they lost so long ago. You guys are entering a fight for your lives and every employee needs to understand that. If they don’t because they have lost that loving feeling or have made too much money, it is time to kick those albatrosses to the curb. It’s time Yahoo! gets hungry again!
6. Pick some priorities and make things start to happen now. You have some incredible properties like Yahoo! Mail, Flickr and MyBlogLog that have been languishing under the old Yahoo! regime. It is time you recognize the importance of these and other properties and put the pedal to the medal and get these guys rolling. Get these properties out in front and let them lead as they once did.

That’s it Jerry. I know it is pretty basic, but I think right now Yahoo! needs to go back to the basics. You have any questions, please feel free to drop me a line, we can chat.

Technorati Tags: Jerry Yang, Yahoo!, Terry Semel, CEO, Rupert Murdoch, MySpace, Google, To Do List, Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, MyBlogLog

I posted a story last week about AT&T announcing that they will be partnering with the movie and music industry associations to hand over customers who use AT&T as their broadband provider who have been identified as downloading illegal or copyrighted movies or music.

In simple words, AT&T will be spying on their customers and if they catch one of their them downloading something copyrighted, they will hand your name over to a group of lawyers interested in tarring and feathering you.

Now to the surprise of both myself as well as one of my faithful readers Adam who was my lone commenter, this post was just not very popular by Hipster readers and did not deliver my usual amount of comments. I was kind of surprised by this, so I thought I would give this another try because I think this is monumental and incredibly disturbing news.

Let’s start here – Are you one of the millions of people who are getting ready to run out and buy Apple‘s new iPhone? If so, do you realize that you will be signing a contract with the same company (AT&T) who has announced that they will be spying on their OWN customers? Before everyone jumps up and down on me, I know their announcement referred to customers presently paying AT&T for their broadband service, but if a company is so easily willing to sell out their customers in one area, how long will it take them do the same in their wireless unit?

The iPhone is an MP3 player, I don’t think it is out of the realm of possibilities that someone is going to upload songs to their iPhone that they might have downloaded without paying for. What is stopping AT&T from scanning each one of their customers iPhone’s for illegal music? That is exactly what they will be doing for their broadband customers!?!?

Now I do not want to come across as some doomsday guy here who is presently digging a bunker in his basement. To be honest, I don’t even have a basement and I hate digging. BUT, this is an incredibly slippery slope that AT&T is on and the only thing that is going to change their attitudes and minds is if their revenues will suffer because of this.

I think this is an incredible opportunity to let AT&T know or even send an email to Steve Jobs himself and tell both AT&T and Steve Jobs that if AT&T continues to proceed with this Big Brother routine of there’s, YOU, the consumer are not going to buy the iPhone as you were planning to do.

I would like to close with several points that Adam brought up in his comment from my original post that I think everyone needs to think about before you head out to your local AT&T store to buy an iPhone.

I mean, this isn’t even the government forcing AT&T to give up our private information. This is one private organization giving up our private information to another private organization so they can collect fines.

I wonder if AT&T gets a cut of the action?

Shouldn’t this be illegal?

Where are the pending lawsuits, where is the supreme court on this?

WOW. I was thinking of getting an Iphone some time next year, but now, forget it. It’s not that I want to pirate music or video. I don’t, I can afford to pay for my entertainment. This is madness.

Technorati Tags: AT&T, Apple, iPhone, MP3 player, Steve Jobs

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend. I had a weekend that I will most likely never forget. I did something that I had doubts that I would ever do in my lifetime. This weekend I proposed marriage to my girlfriend Leigh and to my amazement, she said yes!

One of the things that I constantly do is over think things. I think a better way to describe it would be I think things to death. As an over thinker, when I am planning something, I tend to over think it so much that going into it, I have incredibly high and at times absolutely unattainable expectations. So when things happen that are not part of my plan, I get easily disappointed which usually is absolutely unfair to the people I am with because how can I hold people to expectations that are only in my head?

Well, I am so happy to report that this weekend met and exceeded any expectations that I had which was just another of numerous example of why I have no doubt that Leigh is the woman I have been waiting for to spend the rest of my life with.

I have included a couple of pictures we took during our fabulous weekend.

Technorati Tags: marriage

One of the more interesting things I have learned in my almost 15 years in this business is that this industry is much smaller than you might think. Since leaving school, I have worked in six different states across this country and what amazes me is how the people who I have worked with in other states and in years past keep popping up on my radar screen through one way or the other.

The reason I bring this up  is recently I was contacted by a company’s HR person in regard to a person who I had worked with in a previous job. This person who was applying for a position did not use me as a reference, but just by chance, I had a professional relationship with the woman who heads up this company’s HR department. She recognized the company the applicant had listed on the persons’ resume as a company I had worked for in the past and the woman in the HR department decided to contact me on her own.

Now here’s the issue at hand, I could not in good conscience recommend this person for this job or any other job.  I am not going to go into details why, but bottom line is when people ask me to be a reference for them, I ask myself one simple question, would I want to work with this person again?  The answer for this particular person was no.  Now even though I would not feel comfortable recommending this person, the last thing I want to do is to stop someone from getting a new job and being able to support their family.

So here’s the question of the day folks….  What do you do in this scenario?  Do you recommend the person?  If you do, do you believe that you are putting your own word and reputation on the line if this person does not work out?  Or do you stick to what you believe and tell the HR person that you do not feel comfortable recommending this person?

Let me know your thoughts and I will then update this to tell you what I decided.

Technorati Tags: reputation

I was in the middle of writing a post on how our individual reputations as marketers in this industry truly matters and how small this industry can actually be; when I spotted a post over at 10,000 Marshmallows about a report done by Wal-Mart’s old agency GSD&M. The report said that Wal-Mart as a company suffered a lack of respect that could drive away shoppers. I then followed the link from 10,000 Marshmallows to a New York Times article that discussed the report even further.

In the Times article, they had a quote from a Wal-Mart representative who said,

“I’m afraid this particular piece of work is not very useful, not least because it’s now completely out of date and in some areas just plain wrong.”

Now I have never done any real research into Wal-Mart, but as a human being and a consumer, I would say that Wal-Mart absolutely suffers from a huge lack of respect in the marketplace.

My post here is not meant to bash Wal-Mart, there are already plenty of posts out there for that. The point I would like to make is that it seems to me there are so many companies and businesses out there that have terrible reputations and they seem to be doing nothing about it. Burying your head in the sand and pretending it is not there is not going to solve anything.

Based on my experience working with clients with a reputation issue, it seems the biggest problem they have is where to start. How do you start digging yourself out of that hole? My recommendation has always been fairly simple, start listening.

For the longest time, marketing has always been just a one way street. We have told our messages through multiple mediums and that was pretty much it. Today, I believe listening to what customers and consumers are saying and feeling is just as important as getting your message out. By listening, you can figure out what the issues and problems are and actually put together a plan on what can and should be solved and what cannot. It also can have a dramatic effect on how and where you market in the future.

I am going to shut up now and listen.

Technorati Tags: reputations, marketers, GSD&M, Wal-Mart

I have been following an interesting saga taking place over at PC World magazine. Last week, Wired reported that “Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly because the company’s new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs.”

According to reports, PC World was writing a column that was going to only appear on their web site and not the magazine titled, “Ten Things We Hate About Apple”. It was meant as a light hearted commentary and as discussed in follow up articles was pretty much just Digg link bait because top 10 lists lists tend to drive a lot of traffic.

As it has been reported, the new CEO Colin Crawford killed the story and instructed McCracken to be be nicer to PC World’s advertisers. After the CEO was not willing to budge on this issue, McCracken immediately resigned his position with the company that he has been with for 16 years. Crawford the CEO had just taken over the CEO position less than a month ago.

Well in a surprise move, IDG, owners of PC World, have reinstated Harry McCracken as Editor-in-Chief AND removed Colin Crawford as PC World’s CEO. WOW!! I was very surprised at this move and have to take my hat off to the leaders at IDG. There is someone there that realizes that once you start editing your “unbiased” content based on who are your advertisers, you will end up losing your company’s integrity and the confidence of your readers. And once you lose your readers confidence, it is a very long and hard road back.

This is one of the few examples I know of where the creative or editorial folks won over the business people. All businesses must be focused on the bottom line, but business folks tend to look very short term and will cut their nose off just to spite their face while the creative people understand what must be done to develop long term success.

Technorati Tags: PC World, Wired, Harry McCracken, Colin Crawford, Apple, Steve Jobs, Digg, link bait, IDG

We have had some lengthy discussions and comments from my previous post on the soap opera that has been playing out on the Imus-Rutgers Women’s basketball team. Well, the final straw broke when CBS announced yesterday that he will be fired from his radio show. This was announced shortly before Imus went to visit the Rutgers Women basketball team in person to apologize for his remarks.

So Jackson/Sharpton and others won their battle and Imus is now unemployed. I guess my question is did anyone do anything to actually help win the war? Imus has been canned, now what? Is anyone naive enough to think that this incident and it’s aftermath will stop something like this from happening again? I would say that is a big resounding no. What is that old saying, “People who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it”? What have we learned from this incident that will make us smarter for the next time?

Technorati Tags: Imus, Rutgers Women’s basketball team, fired

MSNBC announced that they will be dropping the simulcast of Imus‘ radio show following the disparaging and racist remarks Imus said about the Rutgers Women’s basketball team. Now before everyone gets their panties in a bunch from the title of this post, let me make a couple of things clear. First off, I am NOT an Imus fan. I have always thought Imus to be a crotchety old boring broadcaster who never brought anything to radio and I have never been a listener. More importantly, I believe what Imus said was racist, sexist and if that was not enough, it wasn’t even funny.

Though I do believe Imus is absolutely getting railroaded and even though I am absolutely against what he said, I like even less the people who are leading the charge for his head on a platter. This country has many prejudices and biases that we have to deal with and it is a sad state of affairs when in the 21st century we still have prehistoric scumbags like Imus getting on the public airwaves and spewing his racists rants. Though I hate even more the vultures who come out when something like this happens and immediately jump up onto their soapboxes when their ethics and reputations are highly questionable to say the least.

This evening when I got home from work, I watched several hours of news coverage jumping between CNN and MSNBC and what I watched made me nauseas. I am sorry, but there is not a chance in hell that I am going to actually listen to people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson tell me what is right and wrong when both of these men have pasts littered with much larger indiscretions.

While I was watching the news and listening to Sharpton spew his venom tongue as he talked about the next protest he was going to put on. I began to think back to the Tawana Brawley case where Sharpton led another charge that caused a huge amount of racial strife in New York in the late 80′s and ended when the accuser was deemed to be lying and made the entire thing up. And there’s Jesse Jackson with his 2001 announcement that he fathered a child out of wedlock.

These men are no better than Imus. What Imus said was wrong and he has come out several times and admitted his mistake and asked for forgiveness. Should he lose his job over this? I don’t know and to be honest, I really don’t care. What I do care about is the self-proclaimed punishers who crawl out out of the woodwork when something like this happens.

Sharpton/Jackson just go away. You’re not wanted and you’re needed even less. You’ve gotten your 15 minutes of fame once again, it’s now time to crawl back from where you came and wait for the next unfortunate incident that you can take advantage of.

Technorati Tags: MSNBC, Imus, Rutgers Women’s basketball, CNN, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Tawana Brawley

There has been a great deal of discussions in the blogosphere regarding PayPerPost. If you are not familiar with this service, the company offers an opportunity for bloggers to write articles based on PayPerPost’s “opportunities”. Once the blogger completes an article and it gets accepted by PPP, the blogger can post the article and get paid for writing it.

At the moment, I am not making any money on this blog . I have no advertisements, no Google Adsense, nothing. Now sometime in the future that could change, I haven’t really given that much thought and I absolutely have no issue with bloggers that offer advertising. There are so many great writers out there who spend a great deal of time and effort in creating an exceptional blog and if they can make money on it, I believe that is a great thing.

What I do have a problem with is when bloggers are getting paid to write something. This might be old fashion on my part, but I believe that the only thing a person truly has is his or her word. And it seems to me whether you have a full disclosure policy or not, when you start writing about a product, service or company that is paying for that article, you enter a gray area which I don’t feel comfortable with.

I think my biggest issue with how PPP works is that before an article can be posted it must be sent to PPP where it is “reviewed and accepted” by PayPerPost. This is their language that I found on their site here. So does that mean if I reviewed a product, thought it sucked and wrote a negative article on the product, would my post not be accepted? Even worse, would they suggest edits and changes that should be made to the article? If so, I believe I have just sold my name and have become a talking shill.

We have seen time and time again in our world how people have lost all confidence and trust in the people they should trust the most; politicians, marketers, journalists, etc. One of the reasons I believe the blogosphere has taken off like it has is it was the one place where people believed in what bloggers were writing. It is honest and opinionated and if we start selling our words to the highest bidder, the blogosphere will become just like everything else.

I guess for me personally it comes down to something very simple. When people reward me with taking a couple of minutes of their day to read and respond to something that I have written, I want them to have no doubt that it is coming from me and no-one else. Everyone does not have to agree with my thoughts and opinions, the world would be a very dull place if that was the case, but they will know that what I am writing I am putting my name on and that is far more valuable to me than any size check.

What do you think? Can we find a happy medium where a PayPerPost can be successful without corrupting the blogosphere?

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, PayPerPost, bloggers

TechCrunch posted a great article a couple of days ago focused on Google‘s new PPA (Pay Per Action) service. I don’t think this should come as surprise to anyone in this industry. You knew eventually Google would have to do it. If it helps smaller businesses with issues like click fraud than great. The only people who should be really concerned are the affiliate networks who might be in real trouble.

What I think is significant about this announcement is what TC discusses towards the end of their post – Google’s announcement of their new “Text Link Format”. What this means is the days of the Adsense banner sitting on the top, bottom, left or right hand sides of a web page are over. Now when a publisher users certain words in a story they post, those words will be underlined and when rolled over, a Google PPC or PPA ad will pop-up.

Why don’t we check out Google’s “Our Philosophy” page, shall we?

“From its inception, Google has focused on providing the best user experience possible.”

Really? So you’re saying that when someone is trying to read something on a web page throwing up pop-up rollovers in their face is the best user experience????

“While many companies claim to put their customers first, few are able to resist the temptation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value. Google has steadfastly refused to make any change that does not offer a benefit to the users who come to the site”

Huh… It sure seems like this decision has done exactly that! You sacrificed the user experience to increase shareholder value.

“Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction.”

Now I did not graduate from Stanford with a doctorate in everything, but Larry and Sergey can you tell me something more distracting than a fricken pop-up?!?!?!?!?!

Google tried to bury this information within a larger announcement an old trick that has been used in PR for years. In politics, they call it “taking out the trash”. They did this to try to avoid the scrutiny and discussions within the blogosphere. I am hoping that my article among many others will not allow them to sweep this issue under the rug.

Technorati Tags: TechCrunch, Google, click fraud, affiliate networks