Jack Ma Wants to Buy Yahoo! What's the Marketing Plan, Now?

Image by World Economic Forum via Flickr
How would you market your company if this was happening?

TechCrunch reports that at a conference in San Francisco, Jack Ma, CEO of China Yahoo! subsidiary Alibaba, revealed that he has a strong interest in buying Yahoo! and spinning off its core assets. Most likely this is to protect himself and to rescue an ailing company.

There is not much more to add to this story, other than to say that it now has legs, as they say in the news business.

About a week ago, a report at Hexun, a Chinese media site said that Ma was serious about at buying Yahoo!. The purchase would allow Ma more control over Alibaba and it would also enable him to take some of the core features of the Yahoo! e-commerce infrastructure and use it for his own venture, Alipay. The stories on the recent Alipay fiasco are many but in short, Ma took the liberty of using his interest in Alipay to spin that company off from Yahoo!. In fact, Yahoo! didn't know it was coming.

I think that there's a strong likelihood that social e-commerce is the next giant wave of building web companies in China. All the major social networks are doing something about it. Web companies in China are buying properties that they can tie onto the back of a social media camel, and they are whipping their networks into shape and building strong e-commerce capabilities.

So, you are Yahoo!. You have a very large Chinese suitor. What is your marketing and innovation plan for this content engine that was once the darling of the Internet world?

#Infographic: Facebook and Twitter Stepping on Student's First Amendment Rights?

Here's a good one. Are Facebook and Twitter infringing upon First Amendment rights in the classroom? In effect, are they putting the smack down on your student's fundamental pursuit of liberty? Apparently not, according to the Knight Foundation.

Even though teachers cringe at the idea of using social media in the classroom, it appears that using social media (or at least learning since the advent of social media) has pushed students to a more fundamental appreciation for freedom of speech.

Check out this infographic:

Why Is David Kirkpatrick Warning of a Social Revolution in Business?

David Kirkpatrick says that a social revolution is coming to business, and that it mimics the revolutions in the Arab Spring.

I think that's a little over the top, but the guy has to get our attention. Here is where he is correct:

In this new world of business, companies and leaders will have to show authenticity, fairness, transparency and good faith. If they don’t, customers and employees may come to distrust them, to potentially disastrous effect. Customers who don’t like a product can quickly broadcast their disapproval. Prospective employees don’t have to take your word for what life is like at your company—they can find out from people who already work there. And long time loyal employees now have more options to launch their own, more fleet-footed start ups, which could become your fiercest competitors in the future. “Companies that have been around more than five years are having a hard time because this is so different from what they know” is the jarring observation of Doreen Lorenzo, president of design and consulting firm Frog.

If a company has not done so now, they should be looking into hiring listeners and engagers, something that people in digital media call the voice of the brand.

Forget about the naysayers that claim they will never hire a social media consultant, or a social media expert. They are right, you don't need a social media expert. You need a communications expert, someone who knows something about language, voice, tone, and the rhetoric. They should know enough about rhetoric to know how to get around it, and how to use language and discovery methods to get to the core of the problems people face.

We used to live in this fragmented world where you bought a brand object, took it home, and then called a separate customer service line, probably outsourced to India, to ask questions about functionality, or to get a repair.

Now it's more like you "hire" a brand to do a job for you, and when it doesn't work out, or if you want more, you talk to that brand through social media channels. It's not about getting help anymore. It's about belonging to a tribe.

You don't need a social media expert for that. You need someone -- a poet of the technologic -- to do that. Face it, not everyone is good at communicating. Some are. Some can do that better than anything they do.

I predict that language use and communication will be some of the most highly valued skills in this new era, after coding and digital infrastructure management. Are you ready?

 

Getting Clout Out of Klout: In Which Our Author Asks Why Should We Care?

We've been mesmerized by Klout ever since all of us started using it at Re-Wired. Each of us has a Klout account, and each of us -- obviously -- has a different Klout score.

What I would like to argue here is that there are two strategies or ways in which people pursue Klout -- and these are, perhaps competing strategies.

We know that Klout is a rather vague assemblage of signals that create influence: Time on a social media networks + active engagement with differing levels of engaged and influential people on networks + messaging (actively clicked on links) + traffic numbers and much more.

But there are also incentives that get us to increase behavior in order to achieve this Klout. What I'd like to know is whether Klout disrupts not only the marketing and advertising model in the traditional sense, but if it is also disrupting the traditional -- though much newer -- social media conversation model.

Klout? Who Dat? 


The folks at Re-Wired do different things with media at different times. I think it's obvious looking at our scores. We can tell you that we understand that our behavior online is different so it makes sense that our Klout is different. Look at our profiles, and you can see we are involved in much smaller or greater numbers of networks relative to each other. 

Brian Tolle's Klout Score and Profile

Bob Moesta's Klout Score and Profile

Chris Spiek's Klout Score and Profile

Douglas Crets's Klout Score and Profile

How is Klout Measured? Should I Care?

With so many social platforms out there, and so many socially-engaged audiences out there consuming everyone's media, having an understanding of how influential one is means something these days. What it means is not exactly clear, since there are competing non-standardized standards.

The tendency is to look to Klout as the social media credit agency. It should be able to objectively tell us what makes someone have a lot of Klout. However, it's unclear.

Is it:

1. Working on a big media platform?

2. The conversation one has with other social media savvy people, in blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, or images on Instagram?

3. Is Twitter more influential than Facebook?

4. Is it a signal vs. noise thing?

There is no clear determination and the Klout website does not tell us much. In a soon to be published interview, I ask Klout's CEO about this. I will link to it here, once I publish it later this weekend.

What Makes Me Want Klout? 

Now we're getting to the nitty-gritty. We really don't know the answer. It used to be our peers. But if the users of Klout are to be believed, now it's Perks.

Our Klout consumption is being driven by our need to be recognized by brands, which makes it different than our typical desire to be known within the social media ecosystem of our peers.  My behavior online -- if I am susceptible to such suggestion and intrigue -- will make me more open to being communicative and associating with people I don't know. I will be looking for people who have the same interests, and whether I know them or not, I will engage with them in order to "influence" them or be influenced by them.

This is the system of social currency in action.

So what kind of person do I have to be to influence, and to be the target of people who wish to be influenced by me?

Here are hints. Here is a list of the top ten most influential tech bloggers on Klout.