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Search, Social & Analytics

New Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer – Yahoo Gets it Right
Air Date: July 19, 2012

Analyzing the Hire of New Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, what kind of expectations will she need to meet, and how much time will she get to turn the Yahoo ship around.

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Yahoo has finally got it right. After a decade of missteps, mistakes and missed opportunities, Yahoo has finally made a staggeringly good choice.

Marissa Mayer, the former head of style and guardian of Google’s minimalist esthetic has left the rainbow pod for purpler pastures as the new President and CEO of Yahoo. She starts tomorrow morning.

The news, released late this afternoon, is seismic in scale. Mayer, 37, was Google’s twentieth employee. She has been critical to Google’s development and the integration of Google’s various products. Most recently, Mayer was in charge of Google’s local search products which were recently integrated into Google Plus. In short, Marissa Mayer was one of Google’s most respected and talented engineers. She was also one of the toughest to work for, demanding perfection in design, look and feel of all Google products.

For Yahoo, acquiring THE Marissa Mayer must feel like the greatest coup as well as the greatest relief. Though no longer Google’s greatest rival, Yahoo remains one of the largest content networks on the Internet with a large number of highly used information properties such as Yahoo Sports, Finance and Yahoo Mail. It also has an extremely competent paid-search business and remains one of the best known brands in the world.

The CEO’s office at Yahoo has been a revolving door the last few years. After Terry Semel (2001 -2007) tried to to leverage content to make Yahoo a media services company, original founder Jerry Yang (2007 – 2009) tried to take Yahoo back to its technology roots. Yang seriously screwed up, making perhaps his biggest mistake when he turned down Microsoft’s $32/share buyout offer in spring 2009. Yahoo shares have dropped nearly 40% since then. Yang’s error had him facing a shareholder’s revolt so he stepped down in 2009 to be replaced by tough talking Carol Bartz (2009 – 2011).

Bartz swore she would turn the company around shortly after swearing at a number of Yahoo board members and innumerable vice presidents. While she failed to meet shareholder expectations, she did solidify a cash-less deal with Microsoft in which Yahoo gave its search technologies to Microsoft in exchange for the lion’s share of shared revenues from providing paid-search to Bing search results and Microsoft’s content network.

Bartz was replaced by Yahoo’s most embarrassing hiring mistake. In February 2012, Yahoo hired Scott Thompson as CEO. Thompson immediately went about laying lots of people off and shuttering development divisions. In May 2012, it was discovered that Scott Thompson had lied on his resume, claiming to have a university degree or two he hadn’t actually earned. This mistake left many Yahooligans wishing, “If only there were an application one could use to verify such things…”  The era of Thompson ended abruptly and Yahoo has since been led by its fractured board.

Marissa Mayer is stepping into a weird place. While Google is increasingly beset by inter-office strife and re-orgs as Larry Page asserts control, Yahoo has been a cesspool of rivalries, inter-divisional fighting, medieval politics and board room scheming for the better (or worse) part of the last decade. Marissa Mayer however, is known to be one of the most intimidating and toughest technologists in the Valley. She is also now one of the most powerful.  Long recognized as one of the preeminent women in technology, Marissa Mayer now gets to prove she’s the preeminent brains in the business of search.  If she can turn Yahoo around, she’ll have proved it and more.

To all our friends in the Dallas Fort Worth area. Tomorrow July 17 at 12:35pm I’m (Alan K’necht) being interviewed on 660 KSKY on the show Everything Internet. Not sure if I’ll be on right at 12:35 but sometime before 1:00pm.

During my 10-15 minute interview, I’ll be discussing SEO and search marketing in general.

You can also listen via the web at: http://www.660amtheanswer.com/

So please tune your radios to 600 KSKY. Everyone here at DAM would love to hear your feedback afterwards.

Social Media Camp Victoria 2012 Recap
air data: July 12, 2012

The interview segment features Social Media Camp Victoria 2012 recap with social media motivational speaker Fred Sarkari. We also talk about the 450,000 Yahoo Voice passwords stolen in data breach.

Quick warning, the show starts with me going on a rant because a beloved and respected female search engine industry journalist was threatened for being a good search journalist. I have no problem with intellectual critique but when disagreement turns to rape threats, I get really, really angry. You might want to turn the speakers down if you’re listening at work.

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My partner at Digital Always Media (DAM), Jim Hedger, and I are fond of debating the pros & cons of the “cloud”. The “Cloud” is that magical area in cyberspace that no-one can clearly define except to say “you know we store it on the cloud”.

To be technical the “cloud” is a collection of servers with mass file storage capacity. The owners of these servers rent out space not unlike a webhosting company or ISP. The difference is that companies renting the space are putting up web based services that let you store whatever you want on them. This a great way to safely back-up all photos and videos and immediately have them stored off-site all for an annual cost typically less then purchasing 1 or 2 removal hard drives.

Where does the term “cloud” or “cloud computing” come from? If you’ve been involved Information Technology (IT) as long as I have, you’ll remember all those network diagrams where the Internet was depicted as a nice white fluffy cloud.

Jim and I might disagree on different aspects of cloud computing but we do agree on this point. The cloud isn’t ready nor should we ever think it will be ready to your mission critical data storage solution. We both think as a location for secondary/off-site storage for your data, it’s ready provided you believe the hosting company has the appropriate security in place you need to trust it with all your data.

I’ve been around long enough to have witness many trends in the computer industry. These trends tend to repeat themselves time and time again. In the later days of main frame computing a major breakthrough occurred; physical hard-drives. This allowed for data to be permanently (or nearly permanently) attached to the mainframe. Operators no longer had to swap magnetic tapes for each application that need to be run and people working from terminals without physical hard-drives could remotely access these applications. With the advent of the PC in the mid 80’s terminals disappeared and stand-alone solutions started to appear. Before too long, organizations started deploying LANs and WANs and started moving to a “Thin Computing” model. The Thin Computing model implied that individual PCs barely had enough storage area for their Operating System, some basic programs and limited data storage. All storage intensive applications (i.e. Microsoft Office) and data would be hosted on a centralized computer which ensured security and regular back-ups. In essence closed system cloud computing. Yet this early 90’s concept was short lived because all work came to a dead stop when the lines of communication went down or a central server had to be rebooted.

By early the 2000’s I was working for a dotcom who was providing services to the graphics community including specific online applications and file storage (what we now call the cloud). As with many dotcoms in and around 2001 they burned investment money like fuel. One day when the bills could no longer be paid, their servers were shutdown without any fanfare and all those who had been using their service no longer had access to their data.

Eleven years later, even though the concept of redundant servers and failover servers, backup diesel & solar generators are common place, the realities of thin computing still haunt us. Jim Hedger once said “the cloud looks light, fluffy and inviting today, but when a storm is approaching and the wind pick-ups they’re going to get blow away”. Yes we are now seeing the first signs of “clouds in a storm”.

A few months back Meguploads.com was shutdown unexpectedly by a court order initiated by the FBI. It doesn’t matter who’s right as the matter is now before the courts, it’s the impact that matters. Many corporations had been using the Megauploads service to store gigs, if not terabytes, of mission critical business data on their servers. Several individuals were also impact as they had been storing all their family photos and videos there because they didn’t have enough hard-drive space on their computing devices. All those cherished memories were gone in an instant, just as if they had been lost in fire.

More recently there was a major blackout on the American Eastern Seaboard in the area surrounding Washington DC. This is impacted some of the locations of the biggest cloud provider Amazon. Despite having generators on hand, the strain of a black-out that lasted over 5 days required them to reduce capacity to ensure part of their piece of the global cloud was still there.

The reduced capacity impacted major cloud based application like Twitter. Perhaps you didn’t notice Twitter going down, but it was moving very slowly. To help Twitter from crashing Twitter in-turn reduced calls by 3rd party applications to prevent their remaining servers crashing. The result 3rd party Twitter applications and add-ons were not performing to their usual level of service impacting their paying and non-paying customers. I’ve even heard of a few applications being completely off-line for over 24 hours due to this part of the cloud being down.

And there is still the reality that your cloud based application might not be there one day. What would you do if one day you woke up and Dropbox wasn’t there, or Instagram or Flickr? Do you have copies of everything you’ve put there? Remember MegaUploads wasn’t in financial trouble, and given all the patent law suites being thrown around and overzealous law enforcement around these days who knows what application or services might be next.

If you’re a business and thinking of putting your applications on the cloud, make sure that you have the appropriate service level agreements in place that might require you putting your applications in two or more distinct geographical regions just in case 1 goes down. For individuals and corporations just using the cloud to store your data files, think of it as remote back-up service and not a primary storage area. Keep a copy of everything local (on your computer or removal drive). If your local copy fails you can turn to the cloud and retrieve your valuable data and if the cloud your using happens to blow away, then you’ll always have your original.

In this day and age, is there any point in pretending we can quit Facebook or Google?

For the 99.998% of the population that didn’t notice, Facebook quietly launched their latest application, Brave New World “Find Friends Nearby”. Basically, when you’re at your next party, you can jump on your Android phone and log into a Facebook site that automatically connects you with others in your geographic vicinity. How does it do this? It tracks you, and then remarkets that information back to you in the guise of being social; with your permission, of course. Although it does sound tempting to some, perhaps we’re getting a little too comfortable with just how much of our info is out there.

But some people are fighting back, if you could call it that. IT WORLD’s Tom Henderson published an article about quitting Google products. A recent article on BBC also explored the concept, noting that the EU has been critical of Google’s privacy policy, calling it ‘invasive’. Considering Europe’s position on cookies, this isn’t a surprise; but can you actually function as a technologist or a geek in this day and age and actually avoid Google-assisted and/or owned technologies?

Leaving isn’t the answer. It is hardly realistic. I’m all about privacy, but I’m also a realist. Caching personalized information does improve individual results, making the Internet the virtual playground we all know and love. But, more importantly, my job and the success of our clients revolve around this data. For any SEO to ‘quit’ Google is professional suicide: refusing to work with anything that Google has touched is pretty unrealistic, if not outright stupid. No Google Maps? Perhaps possible, there’s always Bing. No YouTube? Boring; but possible. No Analytics? No chance. We’re having a difficult enough time coping with non-referral data but a total lack of data, not a chance.

Am I 100% onboard with the idea that everything I do is tracked? No, but more on that another time. I am, however, onboard with the reality of the situation. At this stage of the Internet’s evolution, trying to eliminate all data mining would not only be futile, it would limit the effectiveness of search and social media applications. Furthermore, you should get used to the idea that everything you do online is recorded; somewhere in the world is a constantly growing cache of information with your name on it. Google, Facebook, Twitter, your ISP; everyone is tracking everything.

People can accept CCTV cameras in the streets, but can’t accept the idea that a multitude of organizations are tracking their online habits? Quit picking and choosing your arguments, and go down to the shops to get that Galaxy Bar. Facebook already knows you want it, anyway.

DuckDuckGo Interview with founder Gabriel Weinberg
Air Date: June 28, 2012

Jim and Dave speak with DuckDuckGo Founder Gabriel Weinberg. Named by Time Magazine as one of The 50 Best Websites of 2011, DuckDuckGo is a simple, straightforward search engine that is considered reminiscent of early Google. This is one of the most fun and interesting interviews we’ve ever done.

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This week, Webcology was able to snag the affable and thoroughly knowledgably Gabriel Weinberg, founder of everyone’s favourite dark horse search engine, Duckduckgo.com. Joining co-hosts Jim Hedger and Dave Davies for 40 minutes, Gabriel was kind enough to answer any question that was thrown in his direction.

The following are some of the questions and salient points of the interview. Note: unless otherwise noted, the answers are not direct quotes, but summations.

Why would you start a search engine?
For personal interest – didn’t like the increased amount of irrelevant links that would pop up, or the lack of use of structured content, and far too cluttered. Gabriel didn’t intend to start a ‘real’ search engine.

Did you have any expectations of user growth?
Nope – thought there was room to go where the big search engines don’t – but people took to the concept, so they added more user-focused aspects, like privacy, and a lack of clutter.

Why is privacy so important?
Gabriel didn’t know much about it when he started, as he was more interested in the tech side of building a SE. But privacy advocates started asking questions, and once it was researched, he found it ‘creepy’ to have peoples’ private info, and rather than be sucked into a cycle he didn’t want to be involved in, he chose to dump customer info.

How do you ensure relevant results?
Privacy is a good reason for people to try, but good results gets them to stay – this is done through less spam/clutter and nicer look and feel. More and better instant answers are the relevant issues to users.

What does SEOs need to do to get placement?
There’s no easy answer, but get good quality. As a hybrid engine, they have their own indexes, but they use others.
The goal is not a goal to be a Google killer, but to be a unique alternative.

What is search? What’s important to your users?
Search is getting info as fast as possible with least mental effort. Main problem with Googles’ SERPs was that they weren’t that readable, showing a lot of irrelevant information in the descriptions led to a lot of back and forth clicking. Simplify it with structured content, so you can process it without as much mental effort.

Why is structured content better for search?
Using the tofu ginger recipe analogy, allowing the site structure to determine the nature of the query actually improves search results, as it identifies the inherent need of the user and gives a better user experience.

Do DDG take data from ODP?
They were, but stopped as it was becoming stagnant.

Are DDG tempted to move away from absolute privacy if it affects the financials?
NO – it’s core to what they’re doing. Revenue is tied to intent, so it’s not much of a concern.

Mobile search – any plans to get into emerging platforms?
They have apps for android and IOS, But they’re unique to platform. They plan to release something before the end of year. Instant answers belong on top!

How do they market themselves?
50% word of mouth
25% marketing – the privacy issue has been a huge opportunity for this
25% interviews

Considering how they scale, it’s impressive considering they only have 5 FT employees – their hybrid approach helps with this.

What is a “goodie”?
Instant answers, called goodies as they generally happen serendipitously.

Where did DDG name come from? Is it something we’re supposed to get? Does the name’s irreverence impede success?
There’s nothing you’re supposed to get. Just came to mind one day, and Gabriel just liked it. No focus group. It doesn’t seem to affect its success – people resonate with irreverence. And it IS memorable.

As part of Digital Always Media’s partner Alan K’necht ongoing promotion of his book The Last Original Idea, he is a featured guest on an upcoming Shindig.com event this Thursday June 28th 6pm-7pm Eastern. He’ll be focusing his thoughts primarily on social media marketing campaigns and how organization can measure if their social marketing efforts are being successful.

Here’s a blurb from Shindig about Thursday’s event.

“Join Alan K’necht in an on-line face-to-face interactive session, ask questions plus learn how marketing has evolved and how we can apply the lessons of the past to today’s hot trend of social media marketing. As a bonus, you’ll be able socialize with other marketing members of the audience”

To participate you must register/RSVP. To do so, please visit: http://www.shindig.com/event/alan-knecht

About Shindig.Com

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More Facebook Ranting; Microsoft Launches Surface; Anatomy of an Internal Link
Air Date: June 21, 2012

More Facebook Ranting

Microsoft launches Surface, a line of tablet computers running the Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT operating systems

Anatomy of an Internal Link.

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