Early last week Yahoo announced their replacement for departing CEO and co-founder, Jerry Yang.  Carol Bartz, former Autodesk CEO, has been tapped to take the helm of the struggling Yahoo and has been tasked with trying to turn around the company’s fortunes. 

Coming from the Search Engine Marketing field, my primary concern is how the new Yahoo chief will affect their search business.  According to what I have read, Bartz does not intend to revisit a sale of the search business to suitors such as Microsoft, at least not in the short term.  If the intention of the new CEO is to hold on to the search business, my recommendation is to work on overhauling this business unit.

Over the past year, Yahoo! Search has fallen more and more out of favor with me.  The final straw was several weeks ago when they mysteriously changed their Editorial Guidelines without notice to their advertisers.  Of course this change affected one of my accounts.  Essentially in the blink of an eye, Yahoo destroyed a third of the search engine marketing revenue being generated for my client.  About 98% of my keywords were removed, with no chance of getting them live again.  People were and still are searching on these keywords, but Yahoo no longer has the opportunity to generate revenue from people searching on these terms.

I still have a number of clients that convert very well on Yahoo! Search, but not even close to the extent that they used to.  I’m not exactly sure what Jerry Yang did in his short tenure at the Yahoo helm to help develop and expand the search business, but it was not successful.  My hope is that Carol Bartz brings in the necessary people to focus on their search business and make Yahoo! Search a more viable vehicle for my clients’ search engine marketing dollars, like it once was.

Good luck, Carol Bartz.  You have your work cut out for you.

In celebration of Google’s 10^th anniversary, they have just recently announced an initiative to commit $10 million to fund the best ideas people have that will help other people.  This initiative is called Project  10¹⁰⁰ (Project 10 to the Hundredth).  The name of this project is actually derived from Google’s namesake, a googol.  Apparently, a googol is a one followed by one hundred zeroes.

The main purpose of this project is to get people to submit the ideas they have that will help serve the greater good.  They are not looking for the next great money making scheme, they are looking for new and inventive ways to help people.  If you have an idea, all you have to do is go to www.project10tothe100.com and submit your idea.  It’s that simple, anyone can do it.  Google has set up 8 different categories that you can submit for:

1)      Community:  Help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures.

2)      Opportunity:  Help people better provide for themselves and their families.

3)      Energy:  Help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy.

4)      Environment:  Help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem.

5)      Health:  Help individuals lead longer, healthier lives.

6)      Education:  Help more people get more access to better education.

7)      Shelter:  Help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live.

      Everything Else:  Anything that doesn’t fit into the previous 7 categories.

I applaud Google for what they are trying to accomplish with Project 10 to the Hundredth.  How can you find fault with committing $10 million to helping others?  I can’t, but I might have a slight issue with the way they are going about it. 

I agree that there are probably a ton of people out there who have an idea that they feel is brilliant and will help others.  However, I would venture a guess that the majority of these ideas are so farfetched that making them a reality isn’t really feasible.  Then there are also going to be those ideas that are so ridiculous that they border on insane. 

The first vision that came into my head when I heard about this was a scene from Richard Pryor’s Brewster’s Millions.  I’m sure everyone is familiar with this classic 80s flick.  I’m referring to the scene where Brewster (Richard Pryor) is looking for investment ideas for the millions he just inherited.  One visionary proposes his idea of cutting off chunks of icebergs, attaching some outboard motors and driving them to areas in need of fresh, clean drinking water (or something to that effect). 

I anticipate Google’s advisory board will have to filter through a number of entries similar to this when making their decision.  I do not envy them.

As I mentioned earlier, I appreciate what Google is trying to accomplish with this initiative.  I do have to ask myself though, would it be more helpful to donate $10 million to help fund cancer research, or AIDS research or any of other great ideas that are already out there that are currently grossly underfunded?

As both an Account Manager and the Finance Manager at a prestigious online marketing firm, I thought I could offer some personal thought into two subjects that are very topical to me: the economy and search engine marketing. More to the point, how affected, if at all, is the search engine marketing industry by a down economy?

Over the past several months, the “R” word (recession) has been tossed around quite a bit. While many economists will argue that we are not truly in a recession, Joe Consumer would tend to disagree. The consumer is paying, on average, over $4 a gallon for gas. It currently costs more to buy groceries for dinner than it did as little as three months ago. This, my friends, spells R-E-C-E-S-S-I-O-N to the average person, no matter what economists are telling them. So, the consumer is obviously feeling the recessionary crunch. What about Corporate America….

It’s fairly obvious if you read any sort of financial news or follow the stock market on a regular basis that certain business sectors are also feeling the effects of a down economy. You know things aren’t all hunky-dory when analysts get excited about a bank announcing a multi-billion dollar quarterly loss just because it’s not as big a loss as was expected. So while some business sectors are struggling, there are bound to be some that aren’t affected by this down economy.

All of this is what got me thinking about the “recessionary resistance” of the search engine marketing industry. Our company has seen revenue and profits increase during this down economy. I don’t have the data to back it up, but I’m confident that other companies in the same industry are seeing similar results. The question is: Why? The answer is fairly simple; companies are, and should be, allocating a larger portion of their marketing mix to search engine marketing.

The next question again is: Why? The answer to this question is fairly simple as well: they can more easily track ROI than with other marketing avenues. Where you spend your pay per click management dollars is 100% transparent. You can track how many ad dollars you spent on each keyword, on each engine, on each day and within each hour. You can easily control how many ad dollars are spent on a daily basis. The results of a search engine marketing campaign are extremely verifiable. You can easily identify which engine, which ads and which keywords are driving the conversions for your company. I can’t think of another marketing vehicle that is as efficient, accountable or cost controllable as search engine marketing.

So the real question becomes: Is search engine marketing recession proof? No, but I do think it is much more recession resistant than other industries. As companies’ marketing budgets start to shrink due to a down economy, I see them diverting more of that remaining budget to their search engine marketing efforts. They are able to better control how their budget is spent and see more verifiable results. Not to mention that as times get tougher for the consumer, they will be more apt to turn to the internet in search of better deals.

Bottom line, if you see your marketing budget shrink during this “recessionary period” and you are starting to worry, I would suggest a larger investment in your search engine marketing. You won’t be able to argue with the results.