Hopefully, one day phishing will be gone; until then, beware
 

All you need to do is wire a few hundred bucks to the office of the finance minister of the tiny nation of Twitbuktu, located on the border between Bikini Atoll and Denmark, and email him your bank account number, date of birth and mother’s maiden name, and a few days later a million dollars or more will materialize into your bank account like manna from heaven. 

Right. And if pigs twirl their tails fast enough, they can fly.

By now we’re all pretty familiar with email scams, those too-good-to-be-true offers that multiply like romance-happy gerbils in your inbox. Most of them are pretty easy to spot, even to the untrained eye.

Scam I am
But what should you do if you got what looked like a legitimate email from Yahoo!—or from a business that claimed to be affiliated with us—asking for personal or account details such as a password or credit card info?

Don’t respond to it.

Neither Yahoo!, nor any business we are affiliated with, will ever send you an email or call you proactively asking you for contact, account or other financial information. If you do get such an email or call, it likely comes from a crook who is “phishing” for your information in order to bilk you of your hard-earned cash.

If you think you’ve been “phished” for info, please let us know by emailing phishing(at)cc.yahoo-inc.com, or forward the email in question to the same address.

To learn more about how you can keep from getting reeled in by “phishermen,” and how to guard against other Internet-based scams, visit these resources:

• Common Abuse Issues
• Yahoo! Security Center

—Michael Mattis

Motivating, Empowering and Retaining Your “Influencers”

Editor’s Note: Last time, Louise Rijk, Co-founder and Vice President of Marketing and Sales, Advanced Media Productions, introduced the concept of word of mouth marketing, or “WOMM” and showed how to find the right “influencers” to help promote your brand. This time, in the fifth installment in our series on driving traffic, Louise schools how to motivate, empower and retain those influencers so that they stay excited about your offerings and loyal toy our brand.

Motivating Influencers
Motivation can be challenging. Once you have identified the influencers, you need to look into what will help them help you.

Influencers enjoy being the first to know. They like to be “in the know” about new products, so that they can share the information with their friends. So give them exclusive access and special privileges, such as special access phone line, enrollment in any beta test programs, advanced information or demos of new products.

Learn what makes your influencers tick. It is usually not enough to rely on a positive experience of a great product to court the pure influencers. Identify upfront what social currency is required to motivate them to spread the word about your product or service. Influencers often demand real value for their participation in a “word of mouth” (WOMM) program, so some free stuff, a coupon and a short spot in the limelight usually does not work.

Finally, invite them in. Make it special and official. Invite your influencers officially into your WOMM program.

Empowering Your Influencers
WOMM is most effective when a product or service is new, unique, high-performing and fun—and therefore worth talking about.

1. Place the products or services in the hands of “influencers.” Give them a good product or service, and excellent customer service, so that they have something exciting to talk about.
2. Provide them with success stories about your products and services that they can talk and write about.
3. Provide product samples or literature that they can give out when they talk about your product or service.

Keeping Influencers Engaged
Once the WOMM campaign is underway, influencers need to remain engaged. This can be done in various ways:

• Keep the program visible and accessible for employees and influencers so that they can talk to each other.
• Respond quickly to opinions, questions, comments and feedback. Influencers expect that companies listen to them. There is nothing more discouraging for a loyal customer than to be ignored. Often their comments provide an early indicator of what others are thinking.
• Monitor the buzz online and look for ways to engage. Find out which blogs your influencers are reading and posting on, the forums they participate in, and the web sites they are visiting, because that may be where the next concentration of influencers is located.
• It is relatively easy to monitor influencers online. However, remember about 80 percent of WOM takes place offline. That’s why it is important to have your influencers report back on a regular basis or to meet with them in focus groups. What kind of conversations are they having with people? What are they saying?
• Influencers need recognition and rewards, or they will become inactive. The more personal recognition you can give them, the better. There is nothing more rewarding for an influencer than a “Thank you for your support” post from a company to a positive blog or forum comment regarding their product or service.
• Some of the most valuable feedback on your campaign may be negative. Don’t shut out the “haters.” Listen to them and engage with them if their comments are constructive.

There are many aspects to a successful WOMM campaign: the message, the product or service, listening to conversations, company commitment and many more. But most importantly, WOM is about people, and WOMM cannot succeed without loyal influencers who are spreading the message.

—Louise Rijk, Co-founder and Vice President of Marketing and Sales, Advanced Media Productions

View the other parts in this series:

Word of Mouth Marketing, I
25 Things to Think About Widgets
Leveraging Linkbait
Signal to Noise

Working the a-list at the best little trade show in Texas

Hipster. Scenester. A-lister. In-crowd. Cognoscenti.

These words can’t describe me, because unlike a groovester like you, I’m not going to this year’s South by South West Interactive show in Austin, Texas, March 9 to 13.

What?! You’re not going? Get out! Well, here’s a list of just some of the other trend-setters who will be ignoring the PowerPoint presentations in favor of conversation, crackberries and cocktails:

• Phil Torrone of Make:
• Limor Fried from Eyebeam Technology (she’s so hip that she’s got a ring in her lip!)
• Old-media maven Dan Rather
• Federated Media’s John Batelle, author of “The Search“
• Ze Frank, star of “The Show”
• Film Threat creator Chris Gore
• Dogster’s Ted Rheingold
• Eric Steuer of Creative Commons
• Mediabristro’s Laurel Touby
• A-list Yahoos on the docket include Jeff Bonforte, Simon King, Robert Nashak, Kent Brewster, George Oates, Daniel Catt, Aaron Cope, as well as the inimitable Heather Champ from Flickr
• And, the piece de resistance, from Yahoo! Publisher Network, Cody Simms [APPLAUSE], our own resident scenester, manning a panel on “Online Publishers & Ad Networks”

…and about a zillion others. Still not convinced? To boot, the drinks will on us at a special party we’re co-sponsoring (with our friends from Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, MyBlogLog and Pipes) the evening of March 12 at the Light Bar in the heart of the Texas state capital. Don’t forget to sign up on Upcoming or risk getting left out in the cold.

Help keep Austin weird—and wired—by networking and air-kissing along with your friends from the Yahoo! Publisher Network.

Oh, and be sure to send me a postcard of you shaking hands with Dan Rather. Bonus points if you call him “Kenneth” and ask him what the frequency is.

—Michael Mattis

Intermittent service between 8:00 p.m. PST March 2 through 2:00 a.m. March 3

We will be updating our system beginning at 8:00 p.m. PST on Friday, March 2, through 2:00 a.m. on Saturday. During this time, reporting and login may be intermittently unavailable. This maintenance will not affect the ads on your site.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

—The Team

What you told us about your plans for the year, Part I

Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is part of a continuing series by Senior Insight Manager Todd Lombardo in which he shares your opinions and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

We’ve previously shared with you what you told us about optimization and how you display ads on your site. For 2007, we wanted to know what you’re planning to do as publishers. And in January, we asked you about your top priorities as publishers. You are obviously passionate about this topic, as the quantity of responses made this our most popular poll to-date. 
Here’s what you told us:

For your published site(s), what is your top priority for 2007?

Almost 60 percent of you told us that you were focused on driving traffic.  But you also had other ideas that you told us about including:

“Increase revenue from advertising.”
“Diversify.”
“Re-design.”
“Create more relative content with better targeted advertising and increase site traffic.”

Largely, most of you want to expand your operations, some through increased visitor traffic, others through expanded content or new sites.  Both methods could provide additional opportunities to display contextual advertising. 

Recognizing your focus on driving traffic, Margaret Holland, a Senior Account Manager here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, notes there are many ways to help drive traffic that won’t necessarily require additional expense.  For example, suggest your sites to search engines, or consider an RSS feed to distribute your content.  Or, as some of you plan on doing, expand your content.

Forrester Research agrees with Margaret.  According to Forrester, the top five ways users find websites suggest that publishers don’t necessarily need to spend extra dough:

“How have you typically found Web sites that you have visited in the past month?”

Respondents were able to check more than one answer. Source: Forrester Research, “How Consumers Find Websites in 2006,” 10/06

For publishers who are interested in paid advertising, advertising in search engine results pages, like Yahoo’s,  may be a good place to start; sponsored search targets by keyword, and search engine results pages are often considered some of the “lowest-hanging fruit” for driving traffic.

Since we saw such a large percentage of you are intent on increasing site traffic, our next question was specifically about how you’re planning on doing that.  We will cover this in next installment.

—Todd Lombardo, Senior Insight Manager

Because Retail is Detail

A long time ago I worked as an assistant manager in a clothing store. The colorful owner, Mark, would wax eloquent whenever the subject of merchandizing and retailing would come up, pointing out examples of brilliant cabinet lay-outs and compelling point-of-sale displays he’d seen on his buying trips to London and Paris. He’d always end his soliloquies with a flourish and the refrain, “…because retail is detail!”

Indeed it is. And it’s no less true now, in the online world, than it was back then, in the brick-and-mortar world.

Whether you’re a long-time online retailer, a beginner, or just thinking about getting into the business, there’s a lot of details to learn, so many, in fact, that no one knows them all. That’s why the folks from Internet Retailer magazine started the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition so that internet retailers—prospective, neophyte and expert—could get together and learn the top techniques that move product.

The conference will be held June 4 to 7 at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California.

To encourage you to flush the devil out of online retailing’s details, Yahoo! Small Business is offering $100 off the lowest published registration fee. Those registering by March 31 can take advantage of the added Early Bird discount. To register for the conference and claim your discount, click here. Register through this link using promotion code EC7334, and we’ll have a $25 Starbucks Gift Card waiting in booth 1109 with your name on it.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Guy