How strong is the Yahoo! brand? According to the “100 Best Global Brands” 2009 rankings by BusinessWeek and brand consultancy firm Interbrand, Yahoo! nets 64th place, way behind Microsoft, which stayed on the 3rd spot, and Google, which climbed from 10th to 7th spot. Interbrand says Yahoo!’s “brand value” slipped 7 percent to $5.1 billion this year, and while partnering with Microsoft Bing “looks like a move in the right direction,” it needs to up its game and “provide consumers with a compelling case as to why it is relevant.”
Yahoo! appears to be doing just that. It recently announced a USD $100 million marketing campaign, which starts September 28 in the US, and runs for 15 months in the country and internationally. Playing on the "Y" in its name, the company’s new tagline is “It’s You!” Says CMO Elisa Steele: “Our vision is to be at the center of people’s online lives — to be at the place where their world meets the larger world.”
In a press release, the company highlighted recent product enhancements that support this new vision, such as revamping its homepage so users can access their favorite sites from a single screen. Connecting to Facebook or Twitter from Yahoo!, for example, allows users to see updates without leaving Yahoo!’s homepage. There’s also streamlined photo sharing and editing on Yahoo! Mail, high-quality “video calling” on Yahoo! Messenger, enhanced search functions, and a mobile homepage with various apps that let users access Yahoo! features on their mobile devices.
Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, eWeek.com reports, also suggested that the branding campaign could ultimately bring in more ad revenues. “Advertisers follow consumers, and if you want to talk in sort of parlance of advertising, you always need to build circulation. By having more and more engaged users around the world, we’re building circulation,” Bartz said. “By doing this very personalized approach, [we] get really good micro-insights for our advertisers. Consumers want good advertising, that’s meaningful to them, and advertisers want to deliver that.”
But can Yahoo! really pull it off — not only in terms of growing its user base aggressively, but also in keeping them loyal to the site? Results from Web analytics firm Compete shows Yahoo! as the 2nd most visited site, right after Google, and before third placer Facebook. Facebook, however, is growing at a much faster pace (197 percent year-over-year as of August) than either Yahoo! (9 percent) or Google (13 percent). Plus, as Wired Magazine notes, users behave differently on Facebook than anywhere else online — using their real names, connecting with their real friends, sharing their “likes,” thoughts, news, links, etc. This is something that Google and Yahoo! lack for now.
Certainly, Yahoo!’s expensive ad campaign is a step toward increasing awareness of its brand and value, but the competition to dominate online experiences will likely require so much more from the company. “To close the gap between the campaign rhetoric and what they have, (Yahoo! will) have to step up in certain areas and deliver some best-in-class products," analyst Greg Sterling of consulting and research firm Sterling Market Intelligence tells PCWorld. "The campaign itself won't do much if Yahoo can't back up its promise with the actual experience."
Bartz is confident that Yahoo! can deliver on its promise, telling reporters and marketers at the IAB MIXX conference during New York’s Advertising Week that the company will let go of any products or units not aligned with its new vision. But will all these efforts be enough to get “you” to stick to Yahoo!? We’ll have to wait and see.
Can Twitter make it as a business tool?
The popular microblogging service hopes so, and is repositioning itself as a “communication” network, rather than a “social” network, with an eye toward offering paid analytics and other business tools.
How exactly can companies benefit? Think branding, public relations and market research. They can answer questions and interact with customers, highlight promotions, and basically “tweet” what’s happening organization-wide or personally, raising awareness and appeal. They can also find out what people are saying about them or a product in real time, either by asking “followers” directly, or by using features like Twitter search. And as more and more apps get built around Twitter — TwitPay, powered by PayPal, lets you buy and send payments, for one — the benefits increase.
A best-case example is Dell Outlet, whose coupons get retweeted by users and picked up by coupon sites, resulting in $3 million in additional sales. “The uplift has been more than we dreamed,” says Stefanie Nelson, Manager of Demand Generation, adding that brand awareness has grown. “When we respond to people on Twitter, they get really excited, and we gain advocates.”
But of course, it’s not all roses. It takes considerable time and effort to build “followers” and establish one’s footing on the site, especially because there’s so much customer churn. In fact, a recent Nielsen report found that roughly 60 percent of tweeters end up abandoning the service after a month, primarily because they just don’t “get into it.”
Another issue is managing expectations. Because of Twitter’s instantaneous nature, when users raise customer service concerns, they generally expect a quick reply — often, within hours. And because it’s in a public arena, executives can’t slip up when responding, no matter how confrontational the tweet, and regardless of the 140-characters-or-less limit, because news will travel fast.
Lastly, like most online applications (especially the free ones), security is a risk. A Twitter employee’s account recently got hacked and more than 300 confidential documents leaked out. Companies are also vulnerable to people claiming and falsely using their names inappropriately. Employees could also tweet about proprietary info, tipping off competitors. And the list goes on.
So can Twitter really be an effective business tool? The answer depends on two things: How much businesses use it, and how long Twitter can hold onto its users and, therefore, its appeal.
In its most expensive purchase to date, Amazon snaps up rising rival Zappos for more than $900 million. This came as a surprise to those expecting the shoe e-tailer to hold out for an IPO, but what’s even more surprising was how Amazon announced the merger: CEO Jeff Bezos posted a video on YouTube, a move more characteristic of Zappos and its CEO Tony Hsieh, who himself broke the news on his company blog and Twitter account.
Indeed, Amazon may have the resources, technology and operational experience of an e-commerce giant, but it has long been criticized for not “getting” social media. A recent example is AmazonFail, where Tweeters lashed out at the company after it removed sales ranking of books with "adult content,” including LGBT-themed books. Amazon took a day to respond, and when it did, sent the statement to the Associated Press first, instead of fighting the fire where it started — at Twitter.
Zappos, on the other hand, has mastered Web 2.0 branding. In a recent survey by Abrams Research, the company was voted as having done the best job of using social media. Hsieh himself now has more than one million followers on Twitter, and encourages his employees to tweet, use Facebook and Multiply, or upload videos online to let customers get to know them personally.
“I think people worry too much about bringing their personal selves into business, when I think the way to succeed in today’s world is to make your business more personal,” says Hsieh in an interview for Mashable.com. That “personal touch” also means Zappos makes sure every customer leaves with a positive experience — whether through super-fast shipping, long phone conversations or 365-day refunds.
Will the Zappos culture be zapped, or will it be tolerated, if not emulated, by Amazon? That remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: social media know-how is becoming an indispensable tool in business success. As Hsieh concludes at Mashable.com, “Today anyone, whether it is an employee or a customer, if they have a good or bad experience with your company they can blog about it or Twitter about it and it can be seen by millions of people. It’s what they say now that is your brand.”
