Alert Blog Reviews

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been almost one year that Carol Bartz has taken the top position at Yahoo! She officially celebrates the one-year mark next week but is taking a look back at what was probably a whirlwind event no matter how much experience she brought to the table. Bloomberg reports that Bartz recently gave herself an interesting grade for her performance for the year: a B-. Why is that interesting? It’s interesting to me because it seems to be pretty honest. It’s saying “Hey, I did OK and everything is OK but there is room for improvement.” I appreciate the honesty because she places herself precariously close to a C grade, which is just average. So what were Ms. Bartz’s own words? Carol Bartz gives herself a B-minus in her first year as chief executive officer of Yahoo! Inc., saying she could have moved faster to reorganize the company and strike a Web-search agreement with Microsoft Corp. “It was a little tougher internally than I think I had anticipated,” Bartz, 61, said in an interview at Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. “I did move fast, but this is a big job.” The Bloomberg article paints the picture of Bartz being dealt a ‘tough hand’ (does this writer also cover politics for them?) which can be perceived as the truth, an excuse or a combination of the two. You’ll have to make the call on that one. Her year though started with a lot of work to clean up that ‘tough hand’ which did include dismal economic conditions overall. After becoming CEO, Bartz cut her staff by 5 percent, shuttered underperforming businesses such as the GeoCities Web- hosting site and installed her own management team. Then she broke out the big pen for “boat loads” of fun in the Microsoft, bingahoo, Ya-bingaroo or (insert favorite name here) deal in July, which began the end of the era of Yahoo as a search engine. A partnership with Facebook was thrown in for good measure as well. Now the company is concentrating on its strengths and trying to reclaim its identity in a manner of speaking. The company also has been hiring people for sales and engineering, tapping into the savings generated by its cost- cutting efforts. “A very good company kind of got buried,” Bartz said. “It is coming out.” Last year also saw some pretty dismal financial performance but Bartz is unapologetic which comes as no surprise. Despite these numbers the stock was up 38% for the year. Go figure. Yahoo’s sales have fallen for four straight quarters, and its stock trailed the Nasdaq Composite Index in the past year. “We came out of one of the worst climates ever,” Bartz said. “And if you look at growth of Fortune 500 companies, only being down 12 or 15 percent is damn good. I’m not going to apologize for our growth.” Funny how being down 12-15 percent can be spun into a sentence that implies growth where there was none. Anyway, now that the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” are fading fast, what does Bartz say is ahead for Yahoo? Bartz said she plans to do more acquisitions this year, probably of less than $1 billion apiece. Potential targets include overseas companies and data-analytics businesses that help advertisers assess their results, she said. Bartz said the company continues to improve its products, such as its home page and e-mail service, though she didn’t give specifics. Last year, Yahoo unveiled a new version of the home page, the site’s first major upgrade since 2006. Yahoo is likely going to need to make some serious noise in the upcoming months to be heard above the din that is being made by Google and all the others in the Internet space. What do you think the upcoming year(s) have in store for them?

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Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz Gives Herself A Grade for Her First Year

Most people on twitter want to increase the number of people that follow them. I currently only have about 170 followers and so gaining 1,000 new followers may seem a little ambitious. But I am up to the challenge! Here’s my 10 point plan to get 1,000 new followers this year. (This works out to about 85 new followers per month.) 1. Tweet about new blog posts Whenever I post something new on my blog I will also tweet about it. This may sound obvious but it’s worth mentioning. If you have great content you need to make sure that it gets tweeted. 2. Tweet More Often In 2009 I didn’t tweet every day. There were some weeks where I didn’t tweet at all. I need to change this and make 3 tweets every day. If every tweet garners me 1 new follower then tweeting 3 times a day should give me 3 new followers each day or over 1,000 followers by the end of the year. I could tweet more often than 3 times a day but I fear that it will irritate some of my followers. Since I seldom add new stuff to my blog more than once a day I have made a list of old but valuable blog posts. It is from this list I will pull from to tweet about. 3. Develop a schedule and Tweet at the best times I have found that some times of the day are far better for tweeting than others. It seems that 9 AM to 5 PM Pacific Time are the best times to tweet. I don’t really have any strong empirical evidence and I haven’t run numerous controlled experiments. It’s just what I have observed with my own tweets. So I have developed a schedule to ensure that I tweet about a couple things around 9 AM and again at noon. Hopefully tweeting at the right times will result in more retweets and more followers for me. 4. Make it easy for visitors to tweet about my site If you use WordPress there is a simple plug-in that puts a “ReTweet This” button on every blog post. It allows visitors to retweet your post with a click of button. It also displays how many people have tweeted about it. It’s called Tweetcount and is a free download. 5. Invite people to follow me at the end of each post When people finish reading a post on my blog they ask themselves, “What should I do now?” It’s at this point that you should have a link inviting them to follow you on twitter and get more fabulous updates about the topic at hand. 6. Put a link to my twitter account in my e-mail signature I receive e-mails every day from different people asking me how to get traffic to their website. And I respond to everyone of them By putting a link to my twitter profile at the bottom of these e-mail responses I can get more followers. I have no idea why I didn’t do this before. 7. Have a contest with the winners being picked for my twitter followers I’m not sure exactly how I plan to do this but I hope to have it figured out in a few weeks. The first thing is to find a prize that people actually care about. It has to be something that they would be willing to follow me for the chance to win. I run a blog about how to get traffic to your website (My blog is called Nick’s Traffic Tricks) and I tweet about things related to traffic generation. So I want to gain followers that are interested in this topic. As a result I want to select a prize that will attract these kind of people. If I simply give away an iPod I will probably get lots of followers and most will not be interested in what I tweet about. The results will be that I will gain lots of followers in the short run but most of them will eventually drop off. So the prize I select has to be something that entices the type of followers that I want. (If you have any suggestions on how to successfully run a contest on twitter please leave a comment below!) 8. Write for TwiTip I wrote a guest post for TwiTip a month or so ago. That was probably the single best thing I ever did to get more followers on twitter. Within a few days I had 40 new followers. I’m going to try to write for TwiTip twice a month. This should result in 80 new followers each month. 9. Leverage my email list I have an e-mail list of over 1,000 people that receive my traffic tips on regular basis. And I plan to leverage this list to get more followers on twitter. I will add link to my twitter account at the bottom of each e-mail that I send to my list. I just need to think of a way to really entice them to click the link and follow me. I will also e-mail my list every time I post something new on my blog. At the bottom of each blog post is an invitation to follow me on twitter and that will result in a few more followers. 10. Submit each new blog post to StumbleUpon and OnlyWire Submitting your website to StumbleUpon and OnlyWire will result in more traffic to your website. And more traffic means more people are reading your blog posts and seeing your invitation to follow you on twitter. I’ve personally seen a viral effect with StumbleUpon that increased my twitter following. A couple months ago I posted a fantastic way to get backlinks to your website quickly with little effort. (This was something that my readers loved!) Without my knowing, many of my readers stumbled the post sending a ton of traffic to my blog. A side effect of this was that there was a jump in the number of people following me on twitter. If you do nothing else make sure you stumble your content. I believe this is so important that I will actually stumble your content as well. Just go to: http://nickstraffictricks.com/can-i-stumble-your-site/ © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . How I Will Add 1,000 Twitter Followers This Year

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How I Will Add 1,000 Twitter Followers This Year

Google is ‘all in’ on mobile. AdMob purchased . Operating systems and devices in place. Announcements out the wazoo on just about everything as of late. Now, there is the ability to have your contact phone number show up on your ads on high end mobile devices and the call costs the same as a click. Earth shattering? Nope but it adds to the Google news wave that seems to keep growing. Search Engine Land reports on the announcement that went out to AdWords advertisers recently “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.” Google’s variation on the ‘pay per call’ theme is one that should resonate with advertisers for sure. The ability to click on a phone number and make a call has been in place on the organic side but now advertisers can benefit from this smart phone opportunity. I don’t know about you but the rate of innovation from Google in the past few months looks like their version of “Shock and Awe”. There appears to be few areas that they are not busy at improving on and making sure that the world is aware of it. As a result it’s tough for anyone else to get an innovative word in edge wise. While it’s interesting to watch, it’s also the kind of stuff that makes some queasy. It seems that each time Google provides a service that another competitor does there is the underlying current of “there goes the competitive neighborhood”. This eventually may lead to even more talk of Google being too pervasive and too powerful. When does the “whoa, wait a minute there big fella!” talk turn into action from either a competitor or the government itself? Maybe this year will be the year of ‘intervention’. Personally, I hope not but it may not be avoidable.

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Google to Add Mobile ‘Click to Call’ Feature to AdWords

While most of us in the Internet marketing “industry” were all aghast at the Facebook privacy problem of ’09 , the rest of the world could have cared less. You know those people, right? The ones who don’t live and breathe this stuff to the point that all perspective is lost? These are the ‘everyday’ Facebook users who don’t give a rip about Mark Zuckerberg and the continued search for 7,000 people who care enough to impact any policy changes with the social media giant. So those regular folks pushed Facebook to a point where it had never been before: the number one site during the Christmas holiday. ReadWriteWeb tells us Christmas is a holiday that brings people together, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Facebook has become a part of millions of peoples’ Christmas experiences. For the first time in its history, Facebook was the #1 most visited website in the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year, according to traffic analyst firm Hitwise today. Makes sense doesn’t it? Personally I was more prone to using Skype rather than updating everyone but that is certainly a personal preference. So while the site finished third for the year behind Google and Yahoo Mail it was certainly a milestone to be seen as the Christmas site of choice. Last year Facebook finished second in this contest to Google but was able to flip positions this year. See what a year of gigantic growth can do for you? Wonder if Santa will be as nice to Facebook next year after the rest of the world catches on that their “goings on” at Facebook aren’t as private as they used to be?

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Facebook Receives News of A Merry Christmas Indeed

The results are in: Cyber Monday (and Black Friday) = success ! The numbers are actually up from last year, despite the state the economy is still in. And according to Hitwise, social sites helped to drive sales. (Yeah, FOR REAL.) Their data shows that not only was US traffic up to social sites over the holiday weekend, but downstream traffic to online retailers was also up—especially to Amazon (Cyber Monday winner), Wal-Mart (Black Friday winner), Target, Best Buy and Toys R Us. Wal-Mart also saw the highest increase in downstream traffic from Twitter (among the Retail 500 that Hitwise tracks). However, let me just pull out my favorite wet blanket—sort of. Let’s see, how can I put this? #1—Cyber Monday is a made-up holiday. Nobody outside of Internet marketing/retailing has ever heard of it and it has nothing to do with their shopping patterns. However, there’s good news here, too. We are a nation (world?) of procrastinators—and another day is actually the biggest (revenue-wise) online shopping day of the year—and it’s yet to come . The thinking behind Cyber Monday, created in 2005, was that workers returning from their Thanksgiving holiday would use the Internet to do a lot of their holiday shopping. (At work? Don’t they have the Internet at home, where they have all those glossy ads from stores to compare prices? Were they too lazy/agoraphobic to go out on Black Friday? (Hey, no worries, me too.) Clearly, the logic behind this “holiday” was always flawed.) Two years ago, it was “ Green Monday ” (although now there seems to be some confusion as to whether that label applies to the first or second Monday in December)—with $881M in online sales (versus $733 on Cyber Monday, tied for tenth among the big online sales days in 2007). Last year, it was the day after Green Monday, with $887M (versus $846M on Cyber Monday)—but with this year’s Cyber Monday total the same as last year’s highest sales day (and last year’s highest sales day only a 1% increase over the year before), could we hope for anything higher?

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Social Sites Help eCommerce (and Your Annual Reality Check)

Yesterday, Andy took a look at the top searches for bing in 2009 (am I supposed to capitalize bing or not, someone PLEASE clear that up for me). Today, courtesy of Digital Beat we look at the top searches for Yahoo for 2009. Whether they are playing follow their new leader or they want to still be known as a search engine, honestly I don’t know. One thing for sure is, as Anthony Ha, wonders aloud While we’re on the subject of “year in review” lists, I’ll add that I’m baffled that these lists are coming out now. I understand why some publications feel comfortable doing a list of the best movies or books or whatever (since critics have often received advanced copies or screenings of what’s coming out before the end of the year), but search terms? Really? Don’t we have another month to go? Gotta agree with Anthony on that one but let’s not nitpick when there’s a silly list to dissect! Yahoo’s top searches read like a referendum on just how shallow we are in this world (social commentary is a freebie for you today) 1. Michael Jackson 2. Twilight 3. WWE 4. Megan Fox 5. Britney Spears 6. Naruto 7. American Idol 8. Kim Kardashian 9. NASCAR 10. Runescape So to prove just how shallow I am, I recognized 80% of the top 10 and I have to ask this: “How the heck did NASCAR make the list?!” Is there wifi at stills now? I have to admit I have no clue about Naruto or Runescape. I’m back because I did a quick search for each of those on Yahoo to goose their numbers and I have determined that I was better off not knowing about them but now I’m in. Now when talking about business related searches we have the classic showdown between Facebook and Twitter and ……..drum roll please……… 1. Facebook 2. Twitter 3. Hulu 4. Bing 5. iPhone 6. LinkedIn 7. Dollar Stores 8. Palm Pre 9. Rosetta Stone 10. Kindle Well, while it still baffles me that people do searches for these terms at least Google didn’t make the list. So now the question remains if Google will hold out and wait for 2009 to actually end before reporting their top searches for the year. Not much to look forward to, I agree, but it’s a slow news day.

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Yahoo Announces Top 2009 Searches (December, Deschember)

We talk and think a lot about mobile marketing. But frankly, only a small proportion of cell phone users have devices that are equipped for any substantial web interfacing. But that may soon change—Nielsen predicts that smartphones will make up the majority of the cell phone market in two years. MediaPost reports that by mid-2011, half of cell phone subscribers, about 150M people, will be using smart devices. Smartphones are already showing a marked increase— Nielsen predicts that Q4 of this year will show that 40% of new phones sold are smart devices (as opposed to the Q309, slowest quarter in recent memory with smart devices accounting for only 25% of new phones). I think that smartphone adoption will be crucial to mobile marketing finally taking off in the US. The fact that most phones today are still incapable of real web browsing has contributed to the slow start to mobile marketing. I’ve been saying for years that a better web browsing experience, like that of a smartphone, is crucial to the success of mobile marketing. And Nielsen agrees: Nielsen also anticipates more users paying for video and premium content on their phones. What do you think? Will smartphones reach this much of the market in another 18 months? Will 2011 be the year of the mobile?

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Smartphones: Taking Over the World in 2011