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Well I’ve never been a fan of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and she continues to stupify me with her ridiculous statements which she holds to so dearly.

As covered over at Search Engine Land Bartz was interviewed in the New York Times. She is stunningly moronic in some of her claims:

“Yahoo, according to Ms. Bartz, simply feeds search results for people who have grown curious while reading one of its news stories or watching a video. It doesn’t generally pop into peoples’ minds as the first place to go look for answers during the course of their day-to-day activities.”

How is that possibly the case? On so many levels I would argue the validity of this claim:

1. Yahoo was initially a search directory then a search engine then added portals.
2. If Yahoo doesn’t pop into mind as answering questions for users, then uh, what about Yahoo Answers? What’s the point of that then?
3. Bartz is singlehandedly dismantling Yahoo as a company with unique software technology and turning it into a portal and content company. Granted for many years they have had a content focus but Yahoo Search Marketing and Yahoo Search were always major components of their company.

“The biggest thing for Yahoo is increasing the number of pages people consume and slapping as many display ads as possible across those pages. “My fortunes are tied to my pages,” Ms. Bartz said.”

This is nonsenscial. I have an ad network. We are interested in content pages to serve advertising. Yahoo is a software technology company…er…it WAS a software technology company. How sad for Yahoo to have a such a short sighted myopic CEO.

“According to Ms. Bartz, the majority of Yahoo’s sites will go the way of Sports. In particular, Yahoo will throw investments behind its entertainment, finance and news operations. Ms. Bartz noted that there are plenty of unemployed journalists out there to pick up.”

Well Carol. Hey Carol. Umm Carol….those journalists are unemployed because the notion of traditional journalism and simply serving up that content and selling ads is not the same as it used to be. They are unemployed because many companies in this space are unprofitable.

Excuse me while I go bang my head against a brick wall.

“In addition, Ms. Bartz will remember that Terry Semel, a longtime Warner Brothers executive, was brought in before to turn Yahoo into more of a media company. Mr. Semel’s tenure was perhaps characterized more for losing to Google than anything else.”

Clearly Carol doesn’t believe the notion that if we are not aware of our history we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. I think we can revise this though at this point, Yahoo isn’t in the “losing” position any longer. It has lost. Full Stop.

“Ms. Bartz has decided to correct past mistakes by getting all of the employees on the same page and presenting a more consistent look across Yahoo’s sites. In addition, she’s trying to boost morale and get the energy of the company up again –- a task hurt by the hit Yahoo’s shares took after the Microsoft deal was announced.

“I felt bad for the employees because they think it’s a report card,” Ms. Bartz said.”

Honestly, this woman is a CEO? Of any company? Your share price is a report card of sorts, it’s the market responding to the strategic decisions being made. Clearly this is perceived as being a bad decision. Which it is. It’s a horrible decision.

In fact it’s a series of horrible decisions, capped off by myopic thinking and topped off with a healthy dose of delusion.

Way to go Carol!

Update – Just ran into a fantastic quote from the New York Times Bits Blog:

I’ve got to wonder how much running a sales force that peddles expensive software to engineers and designers has to do with running a free Web site that attracts users through branding and products and makes money through advertising.

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Social Media Marketing and Twitter in particular is a great way for stars like Ashton Kutcher to generate buzz. In fact it’s great for anyone and any business (when done properly). Now I’m as open minded to all sorts of Internet Marketing techniques but this one strikes me as a bit desperate.

Ashton is basically buying paid advertising on another social network in order to increase his followers on a competing social network. Come on Ashton. As they would say on Twitter: srsly?

UPDATE:

Clearly  Ashton Kutcher using Twitter is not a negative thing. In fact I fully believe in the power of Social Network Marketing and provide channels for self promotion. However, As a business driven marketer and branding expert I’m still not 100% certain if Ashton Kutcher’s campaign on Twitter produced any definable results other than the fact that he got some dedicated airplay on CNN. For a hollywood actor like Kutcher, this is definitely a plus, getting airplay like that will do nothing but promote his own brand, his movies and his career (and positively affecting his bottom line).

I wonder what type of metrics were taken into account except for the number of followers? Was any tracking done on Click Through Rates? How did it affect his Online Reputation? More likely than not, it was purely a branding play. I still think the Ad reduces the legitimacy of his entire Twitter campaign.

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• Confirmed: CNN Acquires CNNBrk Twitter Account (techcrunch.com)
• Social Media Marketing Industry Report (incsub.org)
• Ted Turner May Endorse Kutcher In The Race For A Million Twitter Followers (techcrunch.com)
• Ashton Giving Away Guitar Hero? We’re Giving Away Chanel! Help Us Get to 1 MM Votes Before Ashton Reaches 1 MM on Twitter! (popsugar.com)

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1. Using StumbleUpon Effectively

I am going to be writing a 5 Part Series on developing a comprehensive PPC strategy that will ensure the following:

1. Avoid the rampant and idiotic bidding wars which are bound to take place. Years ago the click fraud was not only ridiculous it was cost prohibitive (keep in mind the offshore casinos can be not only sketchy but ridiculously stupid when it comes to driving up costs with no sense of reality).
2. Target niches and develop comprehensive keyword strategies which will saturate across thousands of terms and avoid those high profile expensive terms which have low conversion rates and are targets for click fraud.
3. Thinking big. The problem most SEO and SEM specialists and  have is really understanding how engines work and developing a pervasive and saturating presence through the major engines. We’ll cover that as well.
4. Conversion Optimization. In the world of Online Casinos there can be big budgets but big budgets soften brains. We’ll look at the conversion point on the host site, discuss tactics and strategies for increasing acquisitions and conversions.
5. Stick around and I’ll let you know the last one when we get there. It’s a bigggg secret.

This is not going to be SEO 101. I’m not interested in discussing the basics. This series will focus on advanced items so I won’t be giving alot of background on basic stuff. If you need the background then I highly recommend Aaron Wall’s SEOBook, start there then come back or join the list and store your emails.

Is there anything else you’d like to see in the series? Register on the site and also register for the course (top right over there) and we can get started.

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As I am going through this resurrection of my site I’ve had the opportunity to rethink a few thinks in terms of categories, tags, URL structure, Sub Domain structure and in particular making all comments DoFollow.

Having said that I installed the DoFollow plugin yesterday for a few reasons:

1. It will incite comments – hopefully relevant comments.
2. I want to pass link authority for those who I want to link to from this site.
3. Defaulting as NoFollow is really the backward way to do it. WordPress by default adds the No Follow attribute, although I understand why the need for NoFollow by default.

Having said that I am curious. Is your blog a DoFollow blog?

Update:

Over the pas months I’ve had excellent success in building online reputation through Do Follow blogs.  Here is a fantastic list from Squidoo of categorized list of Do Follow blogs.

I’ll be updating this page with more Do Follow resources.

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@Miss604 Go #Canucks – I’m actually a #Leafs fan but the #Canucks are my #2 team therefore I am NOT a #Habs fan #

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Stay Tuned. I’ll be back shortly with everything updated and new features as well.

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