Battle of the Sexes Networking Stars

Yahoo! Publisher Network attended the BlogHer Business ‘07 conference, March 22 and 23, in NYC and lent our support to a growing business blogging segment that’s finding a lot of value in having dynamic, two-way discussions with its customers and potential customers, the media and influencers. 

One of the alluring things about an “un-conference conference” like this is the opportunity for attendees to network with one another in an environment that encourages the sharing of ideas. BlogHer manages to fulfill on that promise, and does it with a passion that is virtually unrivaled in the industry. Perhaps because almost everyone had something in common—most of the attendees were, of course, women. Not all though; and one of your Yahoo! Publisher Network correspondents, despite his gender, was welcomed warmly.

Two of the sessions really stood out from the publisher standpoint:

The Social Media Press Release
This was an excellent presentation that plotted the shift from the old method of issuing a press release to a new one that takes advantage of social media tools to provide press and other outlets with more dynamic source material. These methods include RSS feeds, video, Skype, photos on flickr, digg, del.icio.us, and so forth.

The take-away: Anyone wanting to promote an online offering really should be diligent about employing these services and keep up on emerging trends in social media. Check out the Social Media Newsroom Template (.pdf) provided by Shift Communications’ Julie Crabill.

How to Measure Social Media ROI
Measuring the ROI (return on investment) of blogging should not be limited to sales alone. You’ll want to look at other positive benefits, including: reputation management, daisy-chain effects (one thing leads to another, and to another, and ultimately provides a business with more opportunities), being involved in your market conversation, leading the discussion among your audiences, gleaning speaking engagements and so on.

In addition, our Yahootini party went over with a bang and we have the pictures to prove it.

Special thanks to the BlogHer team. It was a home-run event and we look forward to seeing you all again in Chicago in July for the next BlogHer conference, not limited to business blogging. Whether you’re a BlogHer or a BlogHim, you could not pick a better conference to attend in the business blogging space

—Robin Zucker, Marketing Director and Marc Levin, Marketing Maven

Keeping it real… simple

Editor’s Note: In the previous edition of our series on improving relevancy, Cody Simms and Amit Paunikar offered up tips on writing good content that’s friendly to both bots and users. In the fourth and final installment (for now), our intrepid Yahoo! Publisher Network product managers offer handy tips on what not to do, both content- and code-wise.

Content Don’ts
The things below can result in us displaying all sorts of wacky and random stuff on your page. You don’t want that, we don’t want that, and your users don’t want that.

1) Don’t use unnecessary code. If you right-click and “view source” on your webpages and don’t like or understand what you see, it’s time to get to work.

• Use structured, consistent code. This saves time in the long run
• Reference a separately hosted CSS file rather than hard-coding style information into the HTML page at hand
• Remove unnecessary scripts from your page. Host them in a separate document if you can

2) Don’t use unnecessary language.Remember high school debate class? You were told to find an argument and stick to it. No wishy-washy-ness. Well the same thing goes for pages that do well with contextual advertising. When a page contains unnecessary words or too many topics, we get lost somewhere around your third rebuttal.

• Don’t have too many topics on a page; stick with one or two good ones. Otherwise, it is difficult for us to know which topic the user finds most interesting…and thus, it is difficult for us to know which type of ads to put on your page. We usually figure it out over time by testing multiple options, but the clearer your page is, the more quickly we’ll get our ad engine tuned up properly for you.
• Reduce unnecessary marketing copy (e.g., “best in class”, “top-reviewed service”).
• Remove jargon (e.g., “iChump user reviews” or “iChump product reviews” vs. “iChump reviews”).  Only use words that actually mean something to users and to advertisers.

3) Don’t try to take shortcuts around lack of content or traffic. You don’t want to take actions that bring low-quality traffic to your site (such as people who were duped into coming to your site in the first place), and you should avoid using content that appears elsewhere. Be an original! If you have to stop and wonder if a given practice is bad or not, it probably isn’t something that you should be doing.
 

• No keyword stuffing. This refers to the dirty practice of filling a page with very targeted keywords, but not offering any true compelling content. Again, your page content should exist for the delight of your readers, not for the padding of your wallet.
• No link farms. Let sites link to you naturally. Remember, you can’t buy love. Buying or forcing links will be equally fruitless for you in the end, too
• No small, illegible text
• No duplicate content. Thou shall not steal or violate other people’s copyrights. It’s not only a bad contextual practice; it’s illegal!

4) Whatever network you use, don’t violate “Terms of Service” or “Terms and Conditions.” These terms are in place in order to protect advertisers. Remember, without advertisers, there is no network. And all of the advice we’ve given you up to this point would be for naught.

• Keep ads off of pages with non-compliant content
• Do not directly alter the ad unit code
• Do not encourage your users to click on your ads (and don’t click your own ads!)

Useful links and best practices:
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
Traffic Driving tools
Site Enhancement tools

Read the rest of this series:
Optimizing for Relevancy, Part I: Semantics and Bots
Optimizing for Relevancy, Part II: Anatomy of a Web Page
Optimizing for Relevancy, Part III: Content Do’s

—Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager and Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager

Yahoo! Hosting Offers an Easy Way to Get Online

As a Publisher in our Network you no doubt already have a site up, running and getting valuable clicks. But there are sites and there are sites.

For example, you may be webmastering your employer’s online business, or you may have an ecommerce site or blog of your own. But you may also want an easy-to-develop site for your resume, portfolio or, perhaps, a new side business. Or maybe you have a less-than-web-savvy relative or friend who is starting a business and needs to put up an effective site quickly, with minimal hassle.

A solution to all of the above needs is Yahoo! Hosting’s Site Solution, a new, web-based site design tool. Site Solution is a super-easy way to get an effective site up quickly. It requires no HTML or other programming knowledge, and offers several elegant, customizable designs in a guided environment that takes you step-by-step through the process. In addition, Site Solution offers automatic site submission to the major search engines.

But we’ve saved the best for last. If you sign up now we’ll not only waive the set-up fee, we’ll give new hosting customers a 35-percent discount for the first two months*. Just visit the Site Solution page and enter the promo code YPNBLOG.

The new service has been getting some pretty good buzz in the b’sphere, including a short write up by Greg Sterling and a longer piece on ecommerce-guide.com.

—Guy Yalif, Director, Web Hosting Products

Our lawyers make us say the following (for fun, read it really fast like they do on the radio):

*Web Hosting discount offers are open to new customers who purchase Web Hosting plans and apply for 2 months, after which the then-current monthly or annual fees will be charged. Web Hosting discount fee offer expires on and must be redeemed prior to 12/31/2007. No other notice of the expiration of this offer will be given. All offers are open to new Yahoo! Small Business customers only, and are available only through Yahoo! Small Business. Customers are limited to one offer per customer on a single account for customer’s own purchase only. Offer is nontransferable and may not be combined with other offers and discounts, exchanged, or redeemed for cash. Other terms and conditions apply; see the Yahoo! Small Business Terms of Service when you sign up. Yahoo! expressly reserves the right to change the price or features of these services at its sole discretion anytime.

Avenue A | Razorfish wins award for “Choose Chase”

Last month we had the pleasure of presenting the good folks at Avenue A | Razorfish as the winner of the 2007 Yahoo! Searchlight Award for their work on the “Choose Chase” campaign.

It was our second year putting on the Yahoo! Searchlight Award showcase, which is highlighted by our top agency partners duking it out for the best advertising campaign that utilize search marketing. The awards are our way of celebrating the creativity and innovation of our search agency partners. Whoever says search isn’t creative, thought-provoking and innovative hasn’t had the pleasure of seeing our clients’ incredible work. We really couldn’t have been prouder of this year’s finalists.

This year Avenue A | Razorfish demonstrated that search campaigns can be used to build brand awareness, and that the message in search creative matters. This campaign made the case for developing “branding” search ads for high-volume keywords. Avenue A | Razorfish proved that a campaign building awareness around their client’s credit card program through search could be just as useful as one that drives users to sign up for the program.
 

Furthermore, the search creative reflected the branding messaging that was used in other media, both digital and analog. This is an incredibly powerful lesson, as the credit card acquisition space has historically been laser-focused on direct response metrics. The winning Avenue A | Razorfish campaign “shines a light” on a new strategy for measuring the power of search marketing as an awareness-building medium.

The other worthy finalists this year were:

• “Sprint-Talladega Nights,” presented by NeoSearch ‘
• “Special K,” presented by Leo Burnett
• “Lexus. All-new LS Launch, Unprecedented,” presented by Team One

All of the finalists presented  interesting, powerful campaigns, which were augmented by their search marketing components. For example, Leo Burnett’s offline advertising included TV spots, prints ads (in magazines like Shape and People), and re-branded cereal boxes, which all highlighted a very specific call to action: Search Special K at Yahoo!

Yahoo! implemented a custom-branded placement at the top of the search results page for searches on “Special K,” and the links drove users to SpecialK.com and the “Better in ’07” Yahoo! Health pages sponsored by Special K for an engaging brand experience. 

Team One’s Lexus campaign maximized the effectiveness of its online advertising with a holistic search and display campaign that echoed offline brand advertising.

All told, these integrated campaign strategies reveal how well search can work with a wide array of marketing needs. With all the progress we’ve made as an industry, we’re convinced there are still many new ways to make search useful for brands. I am sure that next year we’ll celebrate a new round of ground-breaking ideas that will push the industry further ahead. 

We plan to announce the call for entries in the Fall for next year’s awards, so stay tuned.

— Ron Belanger, VP, Agency Development

New VP to help ensure that all of our constituents benefit from a focus on marketplace quality

The term “quality” can be quite subjective until it is related to something very specific. It may take a tailor to tell the difference between good-quality stitching and high-quality stitching. Likewise, it might take an oenophile or even a sommelier to tell the difference between a good claret and a really great one.

As a publisher using contextual advertising networks, you know when you’re displaying quality ads—ads that are contextual to your content and appealing to your users (i.e., ads that are highly clickable). Advertisers, too, know quality. They see it as highly qualified clicks by users likely to become customers.

And the users? They know a little about quality, as well. They know what they want: content, products and services that meet their needs, wrapped into an engaging, trusted experience. That’s why Yahoo! is committed to encouraging quality all across our network, for everyone.

In fact, Yahoo!’s click-through protection system proactively identifies and does not bill advertisers for between 12 and 15 percent of clicks on average. This includes not only click fraud, but also other types of clicks that Yahoo! believes should not be billed to advertisers.

We’re Panamaniacs
As you no doubt know from the blogosphere buzz, Yahoo! Search Marketing recently launched its new search advertising system, sometimes called “Project Panama.” This new system gives advertisers considerably more visibility into their ads’ quality and more control than before. As new “Project Panama” features roll out, advertisers will be provided with even more visibility and control. One of the new features is quality-based pricing, which will help ensure that traffic is priced consistently with the quality it delivers.

But we also haven’t forgotten our publishers. Over the coming weeks and months, as these features come online, we’ll be offering helpful hints and tips on the blog that will better enable you to work with the system’s new capabilities.

A Man, a Plan…
Lastly, we’re pleased to announce the appointment of a new vice president of Marketplace Quality. The new VP, Reggie Davis, will be 100 percent dedicated to ensuring quality for all of Yahoo’s advertisers, publishers and end users. Reggie will drive all of our quality efforts, hiring a dedicated staff that will coordinate quality teams across the organization.

Welcome aboard, Reggie.

Learn more about our efforts to build a quality network and how you, the publisher, fit in:
Quality Standards
Getting Better All the Time
Tips from YahooSarah
And Another Thing
Maintaining a Quality Network

—Michael Mattis, Quality Blog Editor

It’s official: Communitainment is almost a real word

The Internet is now a mainstream medium, according to research company Piper Jaffray & Co., which recently released a comprehensive report under the catchy title, “The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium.”

It doesn’t surprise me, because just a few years ago, the Internet was perceived as the medium of the moment. Now it’s the medium of record.

The study also found that the Internet is the leading medium at work and second at home, just behind TV. Internet reach continues to grow exponentially while the cost of both advertising and publishing decreases, making it more accessible to even the most casual entrepreneur. And with mobile and emerging platforms on the rise, greater reach is possible.

And that’s good news for you, dear Yahoo! Search Marketing advertiser. Instead of looking for customers—which is what advertisers and publishers of the past had to do—now they come and find you.

Search is the second most commonly used application on the Web, with nearly 600 million searches daily. Today, search marketing is a $15.8 billion annual global industry, and it is expected to grow to $44.5 billion annually in the next five years.

With our new advertising system, which you may know by its code name, “Project Panama,” we’re empowering our advertisers with greater control of their campaigns. That means more control over campaign budgeting, scheduling and geo-targeting, which could translate to a greater slice of that very large pie noted above.

Communitainment?
The report, a whopping 425-pager (I read most of it—honestly), has also come up with an enchanting new buzzword: communitainment.

The Internet, says the report, has become a principal medium for community, communication and entertainment. This new activity, communitainment, is taking time away from other, more traditional types of content consumption on the Internet. Piper Jaffray names Yahoo! Answers as an example of communitainment.

Search, therefore, becomes one of the leading actions for communitainment. The analysis found that there are more than 550 million searches performed daily on the Web from all over the world, and that—get this—35 percent of all Internet searches are commercial in nature.

The success of search marketing follows a very commonsensical observation: Customers tend to act on an offer when they are actively looking for a product or service.

Consumers are now in Control
“The historically passive consumer is changing rapidly, not only becoming more informed and confident about purchase decisions, but also increasingly taking control of the consumption of information and content that used to be distributed by networks, studios, publishers and retailers,” says Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. “We believe this will cause a significant rise in prominence of the Internet as a major content consumption and marketing medium.”

In fact, the Piper Jaffray report placed Yahoo! as one of the top companies to watch in this arena: “The company is at the crossroads of changing its structure and embracing the User Revolution.”

Thanks for the kind mention, Piper Jaffray. But it’s our users who are the ones leading the charge. And as the new media landscape continues to develop, we’ll be working with you to be a part of it.

—Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

 
 

Audience Building Lessons form SXSW

South by South West: What a week! Music, internet and film all rolled into one overwhelming “un-conference conference,” punctuated by official and unofficial parties every night throughout downtown Austin. Standouts from the week included sessions on ad networks for web publishers, a case study on the lonelygirl15 phenomenon and mobilizing the masses with SMS, winner of “Best use of an alliteration in a SXSW session” two years running

I also managed to catch a SXSW Jury Award winning documentary called, An Audience of One, directed by Michael Jacobs, two musical performances from Chris Pierce and a kick-butt set from The Little Ones at “Yahoo! Bar Tab.”

But perhaps the most interesting from a publisher’s perspective was the lonelygirl15 case-study (I never caught onto the craze). Namely, just how did they create the following, initially? If you looked at the lonelygirl15 vlogs they weren’t necessarily stand-outs among all other other vlogs that launched daily on YouTube. According to the case study, lonelygirl115 gained popularity through means that seem pretty clever but which almost anyone with enough time and diligence can employ:

1. lonelygirl15 began ‘friending’ other YouTube users, creating a social network.
2. lonelygirl15, or its producers, next sought out popular videos and began commenting on them with regularity (creating name-recognition among an even broader audience of those who are viewing these popular videos.
3. lonelygirl15 began posting “her” own videos and her “friends” began posting responses and the masses who view popular videos linked through to her after reading her previous comments…the rest is history….huge traffic and a loyal fan-base.

The power of social networks helped lonelygirl15 reach the critical mass. Once lonelygirl15 was “outed” and everyone discovered that she was an actress, the episodic adventure changed and it has now become an “ARG” or Alternate Reality Game in which the vlog has its viewers attempt to solve mysteries along with the cast of the lonelygirl15 world. Like all ARG’s, lonelygirl15 blurs the lines between the real-world and fake world, but her fans are along for the ride.

Check out all the SXSW pictures on Flickr.

—Marc Levin, Marketing Maven

A St. Patrick’s Day Cheat Sheet

St. Patrick’s Day is perhaps the biggest unofficial holiday in the U.S. this side of Halloween. Yesterday, Yahoos in Burbank celebrated with Irish music, potato skins, beer, soft drinks and, of course, a bit o’ the gab.

The following fun facts about St. Patrick’s Day were gleaned using Yahoo! Search in about 10 minutes:

• The Irish Gaelic phrase, Erin go Bragh, literally translates to “Ireland until the Day of Judgment,” which is a cheeky way of saying what almost every culture says now and then: “We’re number one”
• St. Patrick’s Day is a national holiday in Ireland
• Despite St. Patrick’s best efforts, there are still a few snakes in Ireland, but most of them, as in other places, are in politics
• Slainte! is Irish Gaelic for “cheers!” and is pronounced “Slan-jah”
• The first St. Patrick’s Day Parade in the Americas was held in New York City in 1766, though the first observances took place in Boston
• Today, some 150,000 marchers take part in the New York City parade
• Irish tartans tend to go by district, unlike Scottish tartans, which are usually tied to a family surname or clan
• About 34 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, and the Irish diaspora worldwide is said to comprise some 80 million people
• The population of Ireland in 2006 was just under 6 million

Yahoo! wishes everyone a happy and safe St. Patrick’s Day weekend.

Slainte!

—The Team

Yahoo’s Ian Kennedy Keeps His Eye on the Surprise

Ian Kennedy, one of our resident eggheads and a senior project manager here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, cast his roving eye on the South by South West confab this week and lived to blog about it. Highlights from his stream-of-consciousness postings include:

• The future of online magazines (interesting lessons for the publisher here)
• Topix’s talk about moderating online communities
• A case study on Lonelygirl15 (the Milli Vanilli-esque faux reality show that debuted on YouTube)
• The panel featuring our own Cody Simms on online publishing and ad networks
• Bridging the online culture gap

Plus lots more detail you’re not likely to find anywhere else. View Ian’s SXSW report: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four.

Also, check out Yahoo! Marc Levin’s SXSW 2007 photo album on Flickr.

—Michael Mattis

Her business is everyone’s

BlogHer.org is the savvy guide to the women’s blogosphere. It’s an interactive social media community that helps women bloggers get exposure and develop audiences. It also shows you what’s hot in women’s blogging, making Blogher a trend-spotter’s dream.

So naturally, we’re pretty jazzed here at Yahoo! Publisher Network to be a premium sponsor of the Blogher Business Summit ‘07 in New York City, March 22 and 23. The slogan of the conference, which is open to both women and the… er… “less fairer” sex (i.e., us chaps) is “How to Succeed in a Social Media World.” There’ll be lots of hands-on workshops on everything from technical details like working with blogging software and online video, to more advanced topics like building audience and measuring your social media success, plus a whole lot more.

What time is it? Cocktail time!

You’ll want to be there on Day One, March 22, because the real deal-closer is that we’re hosting a little mix-and-mingle on opening night from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., complete with Yahootinis.

What: BlogHer Business Summit ‘07
When: March 21 to 23
Where: Affinia Manhattan Hotel, New York City

—Michael Mattis, Head YPN Blogster