Category: Change Management

Change Management, Culture Optimization

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Google Video Migrates to the Google Home Page

In this post on July 20th, I predicted that Google Video would appear on the homepage soon. However, I guessed wrong on it replacing Images. At first, I’m surprised that Froggle was what was removed. After thinking about it more I shouldn’t be, Google Checkout migrates to the back end of process what Froggle did upfront. If there is enough penetration of Checkout, it now makes sense to me that Froggle would be unnecessary.

Maybe they are starting to run the company off of my blog suggestions now… 😉

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SES Day 1 – Social Search – Up Close With Yahoo!

Tim Mayer opens the session – reviews items from previous session.

Yumio – Yahoo Answers!
Quantifying human knowledge. Yahoo! Answers is a collective site. Better knowledge through people. Y! answers compliments web search, giving results that a user may not think about. Provide content and material that. Culture of sharing. People like to share. Remote connectivity. Impressive growth 12x UU & 25x page views. Audience is segmented by topics/categories. Brand-Specific Channel and Expert Sponsor panel.  Showed examples of how Answers functions as a traffic driver from other search engines as pages are indexed.

Del.icio.us – Joshua Schachter – Director
Remember, Share, Discover
Brief overview – nothing new

Flickr – Yumio – her speech was great – but I had to leave the room for a minute.
Talks mainly about social phenomenon of Flikr.
New partnership with Nokia

Trip Planner – Ashish Baldua
Monetization – sponsorship – commoditization – etc

Time – 2.6 words average length, this is lengthening over time

How do you prevent a product from being spammed in Yahoo! Answers?
There are community guidelines. Inappropriate posts are deleted. 24/7 moderation.

Myweb – 3 results from the community. Overlay, this result was saved by Joe Smith – number of saves. Integrating Answers recently into the organic results. People are finding the tests to be additive to their search experience. Chris Sherman followed onto my question by asking about the one box experience versus the additive content. Time indicated this will come with time, but it is something where they need to proceed slowly with caution.

Tim Mayer and his team clearly outdid his peer on this day in terms of communicating a clear vision for social search.

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SES Day 1 – Social Search Overview

Chris Sherman made introduction speech I cant stress enough that he did a really *amazing* job of planning the session and laying out the issues. Major props.

Social Search goes back to the first days of the Internet.

W3.org – first directory.

Directories were the first forms of social media. Spammers destroyed the first directories with spam.

Future – people will be getting these things right

Talent pool is volunteer and free. The scaling is happening due to people participating.

Types – Shared bookmarks (del.icio.us), tag engines (blogs and RSS) and collaborative directories (Wikipedia).

Types of social search – Personalized verticals and collaborative harvesters.

Popurls.com – combines all news sites like dig, reddit, etc in one place.

Scale and scope will be major, tagging, ambiguity of language, human laziness, lack of controlled vocabulary, and of course…idiots!!!

Spammers – new systems create new opportunities.

Chris Sherman is optimistic about social search but is concerned about some issues. Trust networks, increased personalization, etc are great opportunities

Grant Ryan , Eurester speaks:
Flew in from New Zealand and is tired!

Anyone can create their own search engine with Eurester.

Power to the people – socialization of the search technology. Spidering, Directories, Link Analysis, Swickis

Search engines have done everything to avoid

We are a printing press not a publisher. We can decide how it looks and how to make money. We have created 20,000 search engines.

Monetize the printing press the way you want to – chose what is best for your community.

Swikinomics – How can you create vertical search engines. You can own your own Swicki. Property rights are key to motivate people in any economic system.

Anyone can create a valuable asset based on their knowledge

Existing communities and brands can extend into web search to create valuable services

Anyone can organize information on the Internet and get paid for it.

Tim Mayer, Yahoo!

Launching a search builder today – builder.yahoosearch.com

Search breakthroughs come from untapped authorities and rich new sources of metadata.

Yahoo’s mission – “Enrich peoples’ lives by enabling them to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge.”

Obtain a critical mass or high-quality user generated experience.

Nils Pohlmann, Lead Program Manager, Windows Live Search

Live spaces – new release

Ideas.live.com beta release Windows Live Q&A

Windows Live Local – Maps with tags

Windows Live QnA – sign up as qna.live.com

Questions:
Are the demographics different than in a bookmarking versus answers?

Tim – Del.icio.us is tech influencers. Tails of the tags are more mainstream. Myweb are early adopters. The demographic is younger overall.

Subscribers for a tag, Answers, is about contribute valuable knowledge.

There was a question about paying for bookmarking actions and the panel was in agreement that they are leery of going this route.

Regarding Yahoo! – Tim – Builder.search.yahoo.com – create customized web search. Create customized search experience. Reputation and trust are important!

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SES Day 1 – Social Search : Up Close With Google

I never did catch the marketing speakers name….sorry!

Google Co-op – Subscribe links. This is new types of content and new types of information.

Building socialized search. Example of subscribed links flight stats: Instyle Magazine, Search Engine Watch and Digg are good examples.
You have control over how they work.
Fresh content is important.
Target precisely so the experience is better.
Make sure it is actionable.
Make the content pleasing to read.

Query formulation is hard for some users. Google Topic Value Proposition – Refinements allow users to start with simple queries and refine using labels.

Lack of content, users don’t know what they are looking for. Labels suggest ways to look for information.

Users don’t understand how to bring that relationship.

It was surprising to see Google only send one person with a 10 minute speech for this. They were leaving the room in droves even before he finished. When I saw it was going to be an hour and fifteen minutes of random questions, I bailed to the branding session.

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Introducing nextgoogleceo.com 3.0

Lately, Google has been showing that is it participating in customer listening. This is good! I hope it continues.

Since I’ve started studying search engine marketing these past full months full time, I’ve been applying to Google – even with employee referrals of former co-workers and people I’ve met at Search Engine Strategies, etc. with out the applications executed in a way I consider appropriate – that is the politest way I can say it. I’d like to see that change, I’m presently seeking post-MBA level leadership roles within your Search Services/ Syndication, Advertising Sales, Marketing or other leading areas driving customer satisfaction and impacting revenue as you grow new product lines. Ideally I’d love to work within local, dMarc or mobile. I resubmitted (again) today for numerous post-MBA leadership positions.

So I launched nextgoogleceo.com which is a cute take of HR microsites (and discusses how next Microsoft is obsolete now that google is a common verb in our language), except that I’ve changed the wording a bit to demonstrate my increasingly dynamic understanding of both search and viral marketing and the future thereof. As soon as I hit send, I’m leaving for Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006 and look forward to meeting your wonderful business unit leaders speak once again.

I would of course invite aspiring competitors or “next google’s” to come up and talk to me about their ideas as well. I look forward to learning and adding to my large and growing list of amazing people that are making the Internet a special place.

I look forward to seeing all of my fabulous friends at SES San Jose. It’s going to be both great fun and great learning. It’s the 3rd or 4th time I’ll be seeing some of you and I feel like I’m going on a trip to visit family…that is because that is exactly what it is! I look forward to meeting many new folks to and learning many new and great things. Thank you and please travel safely. See you in San Jose!

I leave you with this parting thought: In the book, Creating Customer Evangelists, the chapters on Mark Cuban stand out in regards to the hiring of Matt Fitzgerald as Chief Marketing Maverick: “Instead of selecting a marketing person from the NBA or the sports industry, Mark consciously made a decision to hire someone from outside the industry,” Fitzgerald says. “He believed the NBA marketing community was too in-bred so [Cuban] was looking for a marketing person with a fresh perspective and ideas.”

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Wordcamp in San Fran Today!

Wordcamp is today in San Fran. I would go if the airfare to go to the Search Engine Strategies wouldn’t have been double to do so. Bummer. Hopefully Neal Patel will grab my XL tshirt that I had reserved.

I will sadly miss speeches on Blog Promotion and Writing a Compelling Blog, State of the Word, Monetizing your Blog, WordPress Wishlist, SEO & WordPress, Microformats and Structured Blogging – I look forward to seeing detailed reports on all of these.

In Regards to WordPress Wishlist – I would like to see the following 10 5 items: Continue reading Wordcamp in San Fran Today!

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Yahoo Concerns About It’s “Corporate Blog”

I have always loved Yahoo! I want them to succeed. I love that Yahoo! launched a corporate blog! There are a few areas of concern from my future vantage point as a Chief Customer Officer of an innovative and creative organization though that I’d like to work to iron out.

Top 10 9 Questions the Yahoo! Corporate Blog Raises (and I’d like to see discussed in the next 30 days there):

1) Of most importance, in the video in the first post there is a purple cow to the right of the door as you enter. It looks a like a cow from the Chicago Cows on Parade a few years ago. However, to my recollection, there were no purple cows in the original herd. Could you please take some still pictures of this cow, post them and research it’s travels, paintings and history? I’d like to know. Thanks for your time. Does Seth Godin play any role? I would l like to know whether people see a piece of Chicago everyday as they walk in!!!

2) I’m sure Nicki Dugan, Senior Director of Corporate Communications, is real cool Yahoo! and all but an official corporate blog in a large corporation should be the brainchild and steward of the C-level suite with numerous other blogs throughout the organization available to micro-audiences. The PR department is just one blog of many in the corporation of the future.

Why? In the coming customer listening revolution, the C-level suite needs to be doing more customer listening and this involves massive amounts of change management to change from primarily strategy driven initiative thinking. Regardless of the business, this requires understanding, responsiveness and executive sponsorship and accountability for change management from C-level leaders. Peter Drucker said many brilliant things in his lifetime, among them was “Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.”

3) I need your help as your new blog confuses me a bit in terms of Yahoo’s branding. At the Internet Retailer conference a senior Yahoo! executive told me that the corporate colors were now purple and white only, no longer yellow. Yet the video and your blog have the old yellow on it. Could you please clarify this issue, communicate it publicly and change your blog theme appropriately if necessary? Thanks.

4) Yahoo owns a blog product called Yahoo! 360, a blogging service. The Yahoo! “corporate blog” uses WordPress, the Yahoo Search blog uses Typepad. I find it a bit odd that Yahoo! isn’t using this product or discussing why it isn’t. Could you dig into a discussion of this issue?

5) Nicki, where is your contact info on the blog? You said you read Naked Conversations, putting your contact info on your blog was an important point in the book.

6) From a risk management and business continuity standpoint, it would seem that having Yahoo!’s network operations center in Sunnyvale might not be the best location due to the earthquake risks. A place like Chicago, Cleveland or even North Dakota might make more sense for this function? Will my Yahoo! Mail and experience be disrupted when the next big quake hits? If not, please prove it to me, I’d like to know and understand this better as I’m sure many net citizens would.

7) Speaking of Yahoo! Mail, lately my spam filtering hasn’t been so hot. Many messages that aren’t spam are categorized as such while significant amounts of real spam get through. What is the plan to remedy this and improve that experience? As Mail is one of Yahoo!’s primary retention tools, I would love more transparency and communication than has been provided so far on this important issue.

8) When will del.icio.us results be integrated into the search functionality for relevance? 🙂 I’m excited about this possibility, but will it even be executed?

9) Could you please enable the trackback functionality on your blog?

I forgot what that 10th item was, please forgive me. Several of these topics are ideal for guest bloggers by the way. Thanks for participating and listening, I hope Terry Semel and some other great Yahoo!’s join in the conversation. I look forward to a dialougue on these issues with the rest of the blogosphere.