Hacker. Computer jock. Key puncher. Geek. Code monkey.

Developers, in the words of the late, great Rodney Dangerfield,  ”get no respect.” Except here at Yahoo!

We celebrate the geek every year with Open Hack Day. This time, we did it in New York’s Times Square.  Hackers from all over gathered and submitted their best hacks  for fun and prizes over a 24-hour period.

For all the details, click over to Yodel Anecdotal. Or just watch the movie…

Yahoo! talks to publishers about managing multiple sales channels

Yahoo!’s Professional Services team is everywhere these days. Last week we blogged about several events Yahoo! would be participating in, an IAB Professional Development class about Managing Multiple Sales Channels being one of them. The class, led by Marc Grabowski, senior director of network sales, and Jeanne Hwang, director of consulting, helped publishers and networks set up their sales teams to develop ad packages that cross sales channels and maximize their inventory. Luckily for me the class was in San Francisco: No travel required!

Within the first few minutes we heard why attendees had given up three hours of their day to be there. The reasons the attendees gave ranged from getting a handle on yield management to developing streams of new ad revenue to dealing with channel conflict. With this industry changing as quickly as it is, I understood where these people were coming from. Luckily, Jeanne and Marc had a few tricks up their sleeves to deal with these issues. The three biggest takeaways were:

Times, they are a changin’
The industry is undergoing a dramatic shift. Marketers are becoming savvier; they have fewer ad dollars to spend but have more metrics at their fingers than ever before, and they want results. Over the last few years we’ve seen a shift in ad dollars from brand to performance. Roll in agencies’ demand for more transparency, and you can see how this is causing a pain point that publishers and networks must address. Bottom line:Publishers and networks must become savvy sellers of performance advertising.

Just say no
Successful sales teams work with marketers to identify the goals of a campaign but, more importantly, they help determine if the campaign is likely to see success on their site or network.  Is the marketer looking for clicks or conversions, and what are those worth? Who is their target audience?Does the creative have a clear call to action?Is the conversion path short?Does it require minimal registration information that is easily provided (Such as a zip code as opposed to a social security number)?Bottom line:If the answers to the previous questions point to a bad campaign, sales teams must learn to just say no.

Differentiate to survive
How do you avoid conflict among channels that are selling the exact same inventory?You don’t—it’s inevitable. If marketers are able to access the same inventory from multiple sales outlets, they can take the lowest price, ultimately degrading the value of your inventory. You can fight slipping CPMs by allowing different channels to sell different slices of inventory determined by targeting, frequencies, properties, and so on.  Bottom line:Differentiate what sales channels are able to sell to help avoid conflict.  

—Megan Bergtholdt, Engagement Manager

Yahoo!’s Bill Wise talks trash, tackles publishing problems at Digiday

You know it’s a great panel when quips are tweeted:

Yahoo!’s Bill Wise: “I’m smarter than you.”
Time Inc. Media Group’s Kirk McDonald: “You work for Yahoo—how could you be?”

The ribbing was all in good fun, livening up Bill and Kirk’s panel at the Digiday targeting conference’s  ”The Publisher Roundtable.” But Bill, our GM of Global Exchanges, got the last laugh when the audience caught Kirk apparently stretching his experience in the industry by checking his LinkedIn profile.

In addition to providing a ton of laughs, the conference also tackled some big questions around the industry’s use of data and where the market is moving.

What data is a proxy to valuable customers?
There was no argument that the industry felt that they need to use data to enable accuracy, efficiency and scale. There was also no argument that this is HARD! (Well, duh.) Making data actionable and figuring out which data to use is why hundreds of networks and service providers specialize in only this.

What I didn’t hear enough of was taking into account the consumer consideration cycle and user intent. One panelist did make a great analogy: If there is a 25+ male, high-income, investor on a slide with his kids on a playground, you probably don’t want to choose that time to talk to him about 401ks. The same thing goes for online advertising: you want to target him with a 401k ad when he is in research mode.

Where do we need to go?
What was clear throughout all the panels is that everyone is an intermediary— networks, agencies, and publishers. Networks and publishers increasingly offer agency-like services: Time discussed its branded network, and one of White Pages’ core service offerings is behavioral targeting. We are entering a world of “co-opetition.” Publishers need to focus on syndication to aggregate similar individuals and will likely start selling audiences rather than placements.

—Megan Pagliuca, Director of Consulting, Professional Services

Yahoo! at OMMA Publish, IAB events

Are you trying to capture more ad dollars? Juggle multiple sales channels? If you’re like most publishers, those questions aren’t far from your mind. Fortunately, the answers aren’t either—especially if you can make it to one of the events Yahoo! is participating in next week in New York and San Francisco.

Yahoo! will be taking opportunities at OMMA Publish, a one-day event on June 17 for publishers In New York, to discuss the challenges faced by the publishing industry—and some of the solutions. Jacob Ross, director of partner professional services, will speak on a panel, “Can Technology Save Publishing?” (We haven’t seen the panel yet, but we assume their answer is “Yes.”) Jacob, along with publishers and representatives from technology companies, will help publishers sort through the ad networks, distribution platforms, site optimization tools, and social media options available to them now. The panel also asks whether technology is becoming more critical than content itself.

If you think you should be doing more with your inventory, you may want to check out Yahoo!’s lunch session, “Get the Most out of Your Inventory by Capturing Performance Ad Dollars.” In the session, Megan Pagliuca (Director of Consulting, Professional Services) and Shoen Yang (Agency Professional Services, Consulting) talk about how ad dollars are increasingly moving online and toward performance marketing instead of brand marketing. More importantly, they tell you how to understand your advertiser’s needs and set up your team to grab some of those dollars yourself.

On the opposite coast, and a day earlier, Yahoo! will share its thoughts on managing multiple sales channels at an IAB Professional Development Class in San Francisco. The class, led by Marc Grabowski, senior director of network sales, and Jeanne Hwang, director of consulting, helps publishers set up their sales teams to develop ad packages that cross sales channels and maximize their inventory. One of the strategies they will discuss is treating non-premium inventory as non-guaranteed inventory that can be sold to performance advertisers, rather than simply as your remnants.

If you’ll be in either of these cities, check us out. If you’re not, hey—we’re no more than half a continent away.

—The Team

The Affordable Leading-Edge Conference for Search Marketers and Webmasters  is Not Just a Simulacra

Whether you’re new to online advertising or you’re a seasoned search marketing pro, WebmasterWorld’s Search & Internet Marketing Conference (“PubCon”), to be held next week at the Las Vegas Convention Center, is almost a guaranteed win.

For four days, in the hyper-real, postmodernist splendor of Vegas, PubCon will feature engaging topics to those interested in search marketing, Web 2.0, SEO, affiliate programs, domains, online video, multimedia and more.

Writing about Las Vegas, the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, once wrote:

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert, and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them: the mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.

But there’s no need to worry about being in the dark about search marketing and web publishing, because Yahoo! will be there to help shine a light on the way. For more information, check out the complete schedule. Be sure to visit the Yahoo! booth No. 502 on the conference floor, too. 

Vegas, as Baudrillard said, is the ultimate American simulacra of a city. Why go to Paris when you can gamble at the Paris, Las Vegas? Why visit the pyramids of Giza, when you can witness the wacky prop comedy of Carrot Top or watch an IMAX film about the Nile at the Luxor? Can’t decide whether to play blackjack, see priceless works of art in a casino lobby or spend $4.99 for a prime rib dinner (salad and dinner roll included)? No matter—you can do it all.

Take a break from chasing the ever-fleeting jackpot and get some real, practical takeaways for your search marketing efforts from the Yahoo! search luminaries at PubCon 2007.

When: December 4 to 7, 2007
Where: Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas

—Roger Park, Hipster of Hyperreality

Blogging Comes of Age

There were five basic lessons I learned at the Blogword 2007 conference in Las Vegas last week, the fabulous and seminal Las Vegas trade show hosted by the redoubtable Dave Taylor. Here are lessons one through three:

1. Blogging has gone beyond pastime and into prime time.
How else to explain the hundreds of participants, speakers and exhibitors willing to pay top dollar to hob-nob with their fellow bloggerati? How else to explain the star-studded line-up? A few years ago, who would have thought that A-listers like radio talk show hosts Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved, or Dallas Mavericks owner and dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban, would have lined up to schmooze with a bunch of “little bloggers” like us? Well, it appears that the long tail is finally beginning to wag the dog.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

2. The first rule of blogging is to develop your audience.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise? Who cares? No one heard it, so it doesn’t matter. Sure, you may want to keep an online diary just for friends and family. It saves on stamps. But chances are you’re blogging for dollars, which is why you’re reading this. A small audience means little opportunity for revenue. Begin developing your audience by finding your niche, and make sure that that niche is monetizable (i.e., that there’s gear or other goods or services involved that advertisers and merchants can offer through your blog).

3. The other first rule of blogging is to concentrate on your content.
This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many bloggers think they can throw just anything up, slap a few contextual ads on it, and the money will come pouring in. You can’t hope to build an audience if you don’t offer compelling, targeted content that offers information or entertainment that users are unlikely to find elsewhere. This applies to your headlines, as well. Write snappy headlines that explain what an article is about. Most of your new users will come to you via some kind of search or other. By offering concise headlines, you increase the chance of a searcher clicking on you in search results. And remember, people like lists, like “Five Things I Learned at BlogWorld.” Lastly, when writing headers, people tend to search for problems (i.e., “leaky faucet”) not solutions (”fix my faucet”).

Stay tuned for lessons four and five—the 7 1/2 ways to monetize and why it’s wise to analyze.

—Michael Mattis, Blogster-in-Chief

Join us at BlogWorld 2007 in Las Vegas Next Week

Sometimes publishing and blogging can feel like a bit of a crap shoot. You can’t always tell which plays are going to come up a “natural” and which are going to “crap out.” So it’s appropriate that the BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2007 conference is being held in the crap shoot capital of the universe, Las Vegas.

Publishing and blogging may sometimes be a gamble, but attending BlogWorld might just help you even the odds. It’s pretty much the biggest tradeshow, conference and media event dedicated solely to blogging and new media, with more than 50 seminars. There are tracks for beginning and advanced bloggers, podcasters, entrepreneurs and executives. There are even tracks on sports bloggers, military bloggers and political bloggers. Lastly, there’s my favorite, a special track that focuses exclusively on—cha-ching!—monetization!

For more information, take a look at the complete schedule.

So next Thursday and Friday, Nov. 8 and 9, come on down to the Las Vegas Convention Center and BlogWorld 2007. Anf feel free to swing by booth 325.

—Michael Mattis, Chief Croupier 

Editor’s Note: We all want to go to the SMX Social Media confab in New York next week. But good conferences don’t come cheap, especially if they’re in the Big Apple. But not to worry. We know people. Like Rand Fishkin, who is giving a talk on Social Media Marketing Essentials. As one of the smarteratti, Rand knows that driving more visits to your site can mean more clicks on your ads from more qualified prospects. Driving more visits is a good thing. Driving more visits for no money is even better. In his SMX conference presentation, Rand will discuss how to get more clicks via Social Media. He offers a preview here (for no money).

The buzz about social media has reached a crescendo. Naturally, this has sparked a good deal of debate and trial and error around the practices of marketing across social media on the web. Results, from successes (which we often don’t hear much about) to failures (which seem to get the most press) dot the landscape of social media marketing and inspire both curiosity and fear in website owners and marketers.

Today, I’d like to act as Sergeant Joe Friday and present, “Just the facts, ma’am.” Social media marketing may be a bit of a minefield, but it’s also an exceptional opportunity for marketers to reach a traditionally tough-to-penetrate demographic—early adopters. This is the fundamental reason that social media marketing is so exciting—those who are active in social networks are powerful people—they’re influencers, bloggers, journalists, thought leaders and publishers. They can help to spread your message, so reaching them can have a remarkable impact.

So… How does social media marketing work? In many, many different ways. You can use social media marketing to:

• Create profiles on social media sites to conduct reputation management and control (You can see what others say about your brand and actively prevent your brand name from being abused—i.e. the John McCain MySpace scandal)
• Participate in social media networks to earn credibility and mindshare from other members of those communities
• Share stories, links and content that the community will find valuable, which sends either a positive branding message or direct traffic to your company
• Build links to your website to help with traffic and organic search rankings by building content on social media sites
  Control the search results by using profile pages to fill up the search results (and push down potential negative results)
  Distribute viral content you’ve created to help attract links, traffic and attention (see this post on linkbaiting for more)

Each of these unique activities requires considerable effort, know-how and experience. It also requires that you know where to go to engage in social media marketing. These are the top 10 sites we engage with and get value from:

StumbleUpon—With more than three million regular users, StumbleUpon drives terrific traffic and has social options that help to make it even more powerful
Wikipedia—Incredible visibility in search engines and a powerful brand make participation valuable
Yahoo! Answers—with three million users and growing, Answers is a natural fit for any company seeking to build its brand and expose its experts to the curious
Digg—The Digg home page drives tens of thousands of visitors and considerable visibility to the larger blogosphere
Reddit—Similar to Digg, but with an older, somewhat more mature audience focused on politics & offbeat news
del.icio.us—Tag pages, the home page and the popular page are all valuable for driving traffic and branding
Flickr—One of the best sources on the web for sharing images and a highly participatory community as well
Newsvine—Recently picked up by MSNBC, Newsvine allows for unrivaled levels of participation and content generation
Yelp—The current leader in local reviews and listings
YouTube—The powerful, highly visible video site has millions of active users and allows for incredible brand reach when a video becomes popular

The best recommendation I can give is to spend time in these social communities, learn the ins-and-outs of the people and participants and jump in only when you feel comfortable engaging. For many publishers, this may require a social media specialist (either in-house or contracted) or someone who can dedicate the time to learning the landscape of social media. If you’d like to learn more, a good recommendation would be to stop by the SMX Social Conference in New York City next week, and be sure and look in at my presentation on social media marketing essentials as well Patrick McGee’s  session on Yahoo! Answers.

Best of luck on all your social media adventures!

—Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz

Do Want to Know More?
So do we. That’s why we’ve been running an ongoing series on low-cost traffic drivers to help our publishers get more users and help increase qualified clicks. Check out these previous posts:

Optimizing for Social Media

SMM in Depth

Working the Media

Boost Your Buzz

Optimizing for Relevancy

Leveraging Linkbait

It’s Who You Know at “SMX Social Media”

If you happen to be feeling sociable in Manhattan next week, drop by Danny Sullivan’s SMX Social Media conference Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct, 16 and 17, at the Metropolitan Pavilion.

This intimate little conference will offer convivial sessions on many aspects of the emerging social media space, including social media marketing essentials, bookmarking and tagging, linkbaiting, micro-communities and more. Be sure and look in on the keynote, Tuesday afternoon at 4:40 p.m., as Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us and Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon spill the social media beans.

Also of note, Marchex SEO manager, Matt McGee, will be offering a case study on Yahoo! Answers in the session, “Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing” at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.

“I’m going to introduce Yahoo! Answers and show how it can be a beneficial marketing tool to build credibility and positive brand image, get into some best practices and tips on how to make the most of it,” says Matt, who also notes that Yahoo! Answers is consistently among the highest sources of traffic for his blog.
 
Hey, it’s New York—if social media can make it there, it can make it anywhere!

—Michael Mattis

Image courtesy danhellers.com via Flickr

We will of course be attending this summer’s Search Engine Strategies spectacular in San Jose, Monday, August 20 through Thursday, August 23. It promises to be a good show with lots to do and learn for both online publishers and advertisers alike. If you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay Area next week, look us up at booth 101.

For more detail on the sessions we’ll be paneling, click over to our sister pub, the Yahoo! search Marketing blog.

—The Team