Boomerang

How to put the Yahoo back into Yahoo!

Initially a leader in search, Yahoo! has been trailing behind Google for a number of years and is considered by many to be the “white bread” of search engines for its stale user experience and no-frills product. As a Yahoo! fan, I’d like to see the company rebound and give The Big G a run for its money. Below are a few important things that Google does well. Hopefully, Yahoo’s new CEO, Jerry Yang, is paying close attention.

Innovation
Google software engineers are expected to spend approximately 20% of their time on projects of their choice. This promotes creativity among employees, gets them thinking outside the box, and fosters a happy work culture. In addition, Google’s employee perks and programs raise the company’s coolness factor. Think about it: free gourmet food every day, a gym membership on campus and free transportation on the “Google Bus.” No wonder Google attracts the best and the brightest and enjoys remarkable loyalty. Yahoo! could add a bit of prestige to its brand by creating a number of novel employee incentives. How about a pet hotel? Free massage and spa services? Gourmet health food in the office?

Style
Both Apple and Google have taught us that good design is a true differentiator. Take a look at the colorful and clean Google logo as compared to Yahoo’s, which looks like it hasn’t been changed since 1994. Which one would you want to associate your Web habits with? In addition, Yahoo’s site tries to be all things to all people. There are dozens of options besides search, from shopping to chat to fantasy sports to finance. Yahoo! needs to streamline the user experience; Google’s homepage is proof that simplicity works and that users are willing to seek out the niche sites.

Business Model
Google realized early on that short-term profits should be sacrificed for long-term growth. Its revenue-sharing ad network leveraged vendor participation by sharing click-through profits, making it an easy choice above Yahoo!. Additionally, Google created dozens of new and innovative applications with a “create now, monetize later” policy, fostering the creation of new and innovative applications, which spread the Google brand around the world. Yahoo’s newest advertising system, Panama, is an improvement that has resulted in better advertising for its customers and higher revenue for the company. Yahoo! now needs to focus on its other weaknesses to leverage its current user-base and build its offerings to suit their needs.

The Beauty Brains blog puts the power of knowledge in the hands of consumers. Today’s consumers want to know how personal products affect their body, their healthy, and the environment. Gone are the days of simply buying into advertising messages. With the ability to look up anything on the net consumers just need to make a few clicks in order to learn more about products and their ingredients. The Beauty Brains blog is one place to do just that.

The Beauty Brains found a sweet spot at the intersection of science and beauty, providing unbiased information about personal care products. The blog is run by cosmetic chemists who love science and cosmetics and are not afraid to explain, from a scientific perspective, what a product actually does, how it does it, how it differs (if it does) from its competitors, and what the advertising behind the product means. Most importantly the bloggers explain how cosmetics are made, giving consumers a better idea of what they are using on their bodies.

As consumers continue tune into personal wellness, sites that model themselves after the Beauty Brains blog will be better positioned to build trust and become valuable resources. And the blog will be a hit with all those brainy beauties out there too!

When I was young, I dreamed of hitchhiking to Hollywood and working my way up from the mailroom to the executive office. The mix of drama, good screenwriting, camerawork and surround sound was like a siren call, but one that I ultimately ignored for the glamorous life of public relations. Who knew that my dream of working in the film industry would be possible as a communications pro?

The most powerful PR programs are ones that reflect popular culture, speak to human needs and emotions, and harness new technologies in creative ways. As people increasingly turn to the Web for entertainment, news, information and social networking, it’s a brave new PR 2.0 world. Like the media outlets that we pitch story angles to every day, the landscape is quickly morphing around us. Video is emerging at the forefront of it all: to engage, provoke, demonstrate and influence.

We’re proud to represent some of the most interesting Web-meets-video pioneers. For instance, U.K.-based Friction.tv has quickly become a hotbed for public debate on important issues. The video-sharing site is a Web TV platform promoting freedom of speech, no matter how controversial. As an early innovator that’s focused on social media for social change, it’s achieved a lot of traction in a short time, according to The London Times.

Another client, MixerCast, lets people blend their own user-generated content (UGC) with legal studio content from partners like ABC News, Getty Images and popular record labels to create their own custom Web TV channels. Better yet, MixerCast lets users embed branding and engaging advertising spots, hypersyndicate them on the Web, and track traffic to the money-making mashups. Robert Scoble recently interviewed MixerCast CEO Jen Cooper, formerly with Yahoo!, and the resulting video was posted to PodTech.net as an Editor’s Choice pick of the week.

Beyond new platforms that merge video impact with social media, many larger, global brands that we represent, like Panasonic Toughbooks, are using entertaining viral videos to effectively communicate core messages with key audiences through social networks and popular sites like YouTube. In fact, fans of the popular rugged notebooks have frequently posted many buzz-building videos about Toughbooks on their own.

As PR pros, we’re being called on more and more for our broadcast production talents like scripting, shooting, interviewing and editing. And I’m happy to say: “There’s no business like show business, it’s like no business I know.” A career in PR is becoming a lot like a career in broadcasting and film these days.

If you want to learn more about living a green lifestyle you should start by talking to others that are knowledgeable about the topic. You can find lots of those people at SustainLane.com, a social network for people to find and share reviews on all things green, from organic macaroni and cheese and chocolate bars to eco-friendly furniture and electric scooters.

In addition to providing great pointers on where to find the green goods, Sustain Lane provides “US City Rankings” that illustrate how people’s quality of life and preparedness will fare in the face of our changing environment. San Francisco, “still a shining example”, ranks #2, (right behind Portland) on the list due to its innovative sustainability efforts. With so many green alternatives in my new hometown, it’s convenient to have a resource like SustainLane.com to help locate them.

I was a skeptic about the value of Twitter, but that was before I really started using it and thinking how it can be applied as an effective social media tool. Twitter allows you to send short messages, up to 140 characters in length, to your friends and colleagues in answer to a simple question, “What are you doing?” Messages can be delivered via SMS (aka text), IM or the Web. Ross Mayfield refers to Twitter as continuous partial presence management. Now that’s a nice fancy term, but why would your client, or anyone for that matter, want to use this? Do we really care what everyone else is doing minute to minute?

To answer that, let’s take a look at how Twitter is actually being used versus how it was originally intended to be used. As I see it, Twitter users fall more or less into three camps: (1) those using it to carry on a dialogue in public (though you can send direct messages to individuals); (2) those using it to let their friends know about neat stuff they encounter (a quote, a URL, an event, etc.) without expecting a response; and (3) those letting their friends know what they are doing.

As a professional communications tool, Twitter’s primary value falls into the first two camps, assuming the messages have something to do with a client’s product or service.

But like most successful social media applications, Twitter’s value is not that it quickly and easily broadcasts a message, but that it creates conversations. And consumers are tuning in to those conversations.

Here’s an example of how it could work in today’s PR world: Let’s say your client is launching a new product at a trade show. You could use Twitter on Facebook to let your client’s community know about the product and events happening at your booth throughout the day. That can help drive traffic to your booth and get people talking about your product or service. You could even post a thought related to your client’s customer’s pain point. (For a file-sharing software company, that might be: “Darn, I hate when I can’t access my files from one, easy place! But I tried ‘X’ service, and it works!”)

Or let’s say you’re trying to increase the readership of your new blog. It only takes a few seconds to tell people, “I just did a post about ‘X’ topic.”

Anyway, as with any social media tool, reading about it is only the first step. Try it out and drop me a tweet on Twitter with your thoughts.

Increasingly, information seekers are turning to user-generated sources to meet their needs. For those of you new to the space, user-generated content (UGC) refers to media content that is produced by “ordinary people,” as opposed to traditional editors, broadcasters and production companies. This phenomenon marks a clear departure from the reliance on (I would even go so far as to say trust of) traditional media sources. Some argue that user-generated media degrades the quality of information, since it’s not up to snuff with work done by formally trained media professionals. While this may be true in many cases, user-generated content should be considered a valuable information source, rather than a home-grown substitution for traditional media.

One advantage of user-generated media over traditional media is the ability to provide insight from a body of collective intelligence. UGC that infuses some sort of “checks and balances” is particularly powerful because the information is provided with a more global perspective. In other words, when lots of people give their opinion, readers get a more objective view simply because the different perspectives balance each other out.

Here’s an example: Everyone knows the best way to find a trustworthy doctor, a skilled stylist, or a decent slice of pizza in San Francisco (yes it does exist!) is to ask a friend. Enter Yelp, which turns individual word-of-mouth recommendations (user-generated content) into a centralized local guide for various cities. Yelp readers get multiple perspectives on each item, ensuring that no one voice or perspective gets too loud. When I need a quick neighborhood recommendation, this information is more valuable than the food review in a food critic’s column of a newspaper. It might not be as polished or well written, but it gives me exactly the content I’m looking for.

The ability to gather collective intelligence adds a dimension of credibility and global perspective - two aspects that would dramatically strengthen user-generated news sources. Those UGC sources that are positioned to incorporate wide-scale user-generated content are going to make a huge impact on the media landscape.

Will everyone who hates social networks please raise your hand? Do you (like me) believe that the overwhelming lameness of these networks overshadows their usefulness? Granted, they can be an excellent way to connect with people you never would have connected to offline. They can also be great for companies that want to connect with their customers to get real, instant feedback — which is invaluable. For my personal life however, I haven’t found social networks to be essential, since they are completely separate from my normal Web experience.

The good news is that social networks are finally getting the picture. Two weeks ago, Facebook launched its latest feature, positioning itself as an operating system by allowing outside developers to build programs to live on its site. Basically, the social network is allowing anyone with the right knowledge to create a program for Facebookers to add to their site and spread virally. I care, because now a ton of really cool mini apps will be created that focus on the things I’m interested in, making my social networking experience more in line with my regular Internet experience.

Another great benefit is that the cost of entry for creating and spreading a tool has virtually diminished. You no longer need an entire web company to produce a cool application and distribute it to a wide user base. Any single person on Earth who has a unique idea and the right knowledge can create a tool that is used by many thousands, if not millions of people within a short period of time. Take iLike, an application that makes music recommendations based on preferences, and allows users to know what types of music their friends are listening to. This company created an application for Facebook immediately after the feature launched. After only a week, around a million users have added iLike to their page.

I have to admit, I didn’t think Facebook had the guts to step up to the plate and hand the reins over to the masses. There are a number of risks it is taking on by allowing others to add to its site. Because anyone can create a program and spread it instantly, Facebook risks associating its brand with content it has no control over. Also, many users blame programs they don’t like on Facebook, rather than the developers. It will be interesting to see how other large companies deal with relinquishing control as this trend expands. Will their next step be massive regulation of this type of content? Will they try to disassociate themselves from content that appears undesirable?

I believe that the benefits of opening up these resources far outweigh the cost.  Facebook’s evolution represents a large shift in the Internet experience. If it’s successful, it will make the social network a much more useful and integral part of the Web experience. We will be able to connect to our friends in more ways and take all our favorite parts of the Web and collect them in one place. My question to you is what type of application do you want to see created on the site?