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Idearc Creates Executive Council, Reorganizes Sales Division

Idearc CEO Scott Klein has announced the nine members of the new Executive Council. In addition to the new Council, Idearc is reorganizing their sales operations.

The nine Council members are:

Samuel D. (Dee) Jones, executive vice president, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. Jones, who also served as senior vice president - Investor Relations, has been Acting CFO since November 2007.
Cody Wilbanks, executive vice president - General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. Wilbanks has been Acting General Counsel since March.
Sandy Henjum, executive vice president - Transformation and Marketing. Henjum’s centralized organization will guide a wide range of business transformation initiatives that address sales productivity, new products, pricing programs and market and customer segmentation.
Briggs Ferguson continues as president - Internet. Ferguson, a former Citysearch executive who joined Idearc in April, will focus on executing Idearc’s complete digital strategy as rapidly as possible.
Georgia Scaife, executive vice president - Human Resources and Employee Administration. Scaife’s organization has been restructured to further centralize the department and improve its efficiency and focus.
Frank Gatto continues in his role as executive vice president – Operations. Gatto’s organization is responsible for receivables management and billing, sales support and customer care, publishing and printing services, distribution, Information Technology (IT) and other operational functions.

In sales, three Vice Presidents will oversee new divisions, divided into East, West, and Central.

Mike Pawlowski will oversee East and Scott Laver will oversee Central. Newcomber Dave Bethea joins Idearc from PrimeSource Building Products, an independent distributor of building products, where he served as regional Vice President for Operations.

“I’m very pleased and excited about our new organization,” Klein said. “I’m thrilled to be able to make this announcement almost one month ahead of schedule in order to allow us to even more aggressively move ahead with our transformational plans.”

SES San Jose 2008: Top 10 Stories

Over the past few days, more and more articles and posts from SES San Jose 2008 have been written. I’m sure there will be more stories to come out of the event, but this seems like a good time to recap the conference.

A quick Google News search for “SES San Jose” finds 276 articles from the past month – 138 when the duplicates are removed. A search in Yahoo! News for “SES San Jose” finds 114 articles from the past month. A query in Google Blog Search for “SES San Jose” finds 5,554 blog posts that mention “SES San Jose” from the past month, 337 when the duplicates are removed.

A little content analysis reveals the top 10 stories from the past month that were triggered by a keynote, panel, session or workshop at the 10th annual SES confence. Seven of these stories were ones that I predicted in my post on the Search Engine Watch Blog entitled “SES San Jose tip sheet for bloggers and journalists.” But three of the top stories came as surprises — even to an SES veteran like myself. Here, in order, are the Big Ten.

Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, SES & Search Engine Watch. (Twenty-three articles and 72 unduplicated blog posts, including “SES San Jose Photos – Paparazzi Style” by Lee Odden of TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog.

Tuesday Morning Keynote by Satya Nadella, SVP, Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft. (Nineteen articles and 69 unduplicated blog posts, including “Is Microsoft’s Vision of Search Enough to Catch Google?” by Rob Hof of BusinessWeek. Rob wrote, “It would be dangerous for anyone to write off Microsoft. Its determination was on display today at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior VP of search, portal, and advertising platform group, told the crowd that he sees searchers moving from merely typing keywords into Google to getting tasks done.”

Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Guru of Google. (Ten articles, 74 blog posts and a YouTube video entitled “Matt Cutts on Big Brand BlackHat Sites” on the ChrisDaviesCa Channel. Chris happened to be sitting next to Matt, Google’s head of webspam, when Matt weighed in about big brand sites that have been banned for black hat seo practices during the Black Hat/White Hat session during SES San Jose 2008.

Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land. (Eleven articles, 41 unduplicated blog posts and a video interview by Mike McDonald of the WebProNews Video Blog entitled, “SES: Staying Focused On Search.”) Danny said that social marketing and all sorts of other things can be useful, but it’s important to get back to the search marketing basics.

Universal & Blended Search. (Four articles, 42 unduplicated blog posts and a video interview for the SESConferenceExpo channel entitled, “Johanna Wright of Google on Google Universal Search.” Johanna gives some insight into how vertical search results are blended into universal search results and advocates a thoughtful approach to making information accessible to Google through use of sitemaps and detailed descriptions.

Keynote Roundtable: Why Does Search Get the Credit for Everything? (Four articles and 38 blog posts, including “SES roundtable: Search shouldn’t take all the credit” by Ellen Keohane of DM News. Ellen wrote, “Search marketing often gets credit for the final sale or conversion, even when it shouldn’t, according to a roundtable discussion today at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose.”

Opening Keynote Presentation by Lee Siegel, author of Against the Machine. (Two articles and 27 unduplicated blog posts, including “Trust: The Backbone of Consumer Satisfaction” by Kevin Lee of ClickZ.) Kevin wrote, “In an afternoon keynote, Lee Siegel, author of “Against the Machine,” predicted a backlash against the Internet as it has evolved. His book (which I’ve partially read) discusses how there are unforeseen consequences due to technology, and the Internet is responsible for largely unforeseen positive and negative effects on individuals and society.”

Thursday Morning Keynote: Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick. (One article and 27 unduplicated blog posts, including “Dan Heath 2008 SES San Jose Keynote” on WebmasterRadio.FM.) Listen to Dan explain Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die as he delivers his 2008 SES San Jose Keynote. Dan offers six key factors for sticky ideas, plus offers numerous supporting examples.

Orion Panel: How Much Search is Enough? (Three articles and 19 unduplicated blog posts, including “SES San Jose 2008 - Where’s Money For Search Going?” by Manoj Jasra of WebProNews. Manoj wrote, “How much Search is enough? Aaron Goldman of Resolution Media, Steven Kaufman of Digitas, Robert Murray of iProspect and Bob Tripathi of Discover Financial Services were posed that very question by SES’s own, Kevin Ryan.”

Orion Panel: Technical & Information Giants. (Six articles and 15 unduplicated blog posts, including “Technical & Information Giants Keynote - SES San Jose 2008” by Jason McElweenie of The SEM Blog. Jason wrote, “WOW. Let me repeat that. WOW….This was a great panel of some very huge icons on the web today. Bravo SES!”

Yahoo Snags Search Ad Marketshare Gain at Google’s Expense

Analytics firm Covario says Yahoo gained paid search advertising at the expense of Google in the second quarter of 2008.

Covario also said that paid search has gone through a “compression” period, where growth has declined from 52% to 43%.

“Our client roster inspired us to launch this analysis series due to our customers’ unique positions in the advertising ecosystem – they are US-based, but also global in the scope regarding their paid search advertising programs, so they tend not to be retailers or ecommerce vendors who focus on one geographic region,” said Craig Macdonald, vice president of marketing and product management at Covario. “It is very exciting for us to be able to observe first-hand such trends as the bucking of the biggest losing streak in the paid search market – the loss of market share by Yahoo to Google.”

Of course, Google has seen a decline in clicks and search ads they attribute to increasing quality of their ads. That reasoning worked for Q1 results, which blew away Wall Street expectations, based largely on analytical data. Q2 disappointed the street, but so did Microsoft and Yahoo.

Blogs That You Wouldn’t Want To Have (Part 2)

In the previous post, we took a look at one blog type that – despite the blogger’s good intentions – may not be as appealing to readers as one would have previously thought. We talked about how having too many anchor text links can take away (A LOT) from the value of a blog. Now [...]

Yahoo Updates Ad Performance Reports for Sponsored Search Accounts

Yahoo has released updates to the ad performance reports for sponsored search accounts. First up, three columns have been added to the report. They are:

Ad ID column – This column displays your Ad’s ID number.
Ad: – This column provides a visual representation of your ad, including its title, short description and display URL.
Destination URL

The columns are available in report downloads as well. Additionally, Yahoo has consolidated ad statuses into a single column.

The updates have been made across global markets and Mobile Sponsored Search.

What do you think of the updates? Let us know in the comments.

Liana Evans of KeyRelevance on social media optimization (SMO)

One of the people that you will want to hear speak at SES San Jose is Liana Evans of KeyRelevance. Li is the director of Internet marketing at KeyRelevance and a member of the “Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization (SMO)” panel on Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2008, at 1 p.m.

I’m bummed out because I’ll be speaking at the “News Search SEO” session at the same time, so I won’t be able to hear what she has to say in San Jose.

So, through the magic of YouTube video, I’ve interviewed Li – so I won’t miss her keen insights entirely – although there is no substitute to hearing her first hand.

Li is a search marketing guru (literally), especially on topics like social media optimization (SMO). So, here’s a sneak preview of what she has to say.

Why Your Social Media Campaigns Should Socialize More

Liana is also famous for her Flickr photos from sessions, panels, exhibits, the night life, and everything in between at Search Engine Strategies conferences and she won one of the Flickr photo sharing awards for SES London 2008.

Li specializes in social media marketing, blog optimization, link building and viral marketing. I like to hang out with her at SES conferences because Li has a background in both public relations and information technology.

Li is the creator and main contributor to Search Marketing Gurus and has assembled a well rounded group of professional search marketing professionals to contribute to the blog. Oh, and she’s shared her secret for finding the best cheesesteak in Philly with me – not that this has influenced my favorable opinion of her at all.

Blogs That You Wouldn’t Want To Have

Have you ever visited a blog and then found yourself being disappointed, even irritated, that you visited that blog? Let us be honest – there are many blogs out there that fall into this category. For one reason or another, these blogs do not really offer much to their readers or perhaps they do but [...]

Microsoft Moves on from Yahoo Again; Talks Internal Search Innovation

After the latest round of attempted negotiations with Yahoo and investor Carl Icahn, Microsoft is once again saying that it is moving on from trying to acquire the second-place search engine.

Addressing the attendees at Microsoft’s financial analyst meeting, Ballmer explained Microsoft’s Plan B for building search and competing with Google. And like Joel McHale on E!’s The Soup, I’ve read the transcript so you don’t have to. Here are the sound bites.

First up, the reason why Microsoft thinks it can compete in a Google-dominated search marketplace:

Search is ripe for innovation. It has not been the most innovative category in the world. I mean, think back, what did search look like five years ago, 10 blue links on the left, some ads on the right, and maybe some ads on the top. What does it look like now, 10 blue links on the left, some ads on the right, and maybe something on the top. It is ripe for innovation. If you say to yourself, five years from now, 10 years from now will search be as humdrum, hard, 50 percent of searches don’t actually lead to an answer to somebody’s problem, is this an area that’s ripe for innovation, in user experience, natural language, semantic understanding, consumer experience? The business model hasn’t been touched.

Give Google credit, they invented the business model that supports the modern search business, and yet it hasn’t been touched. How do you involve the consumer? How do you move to a pay-for-action model? How do you reward the consumer, and involve the consumer economically? This is a category that’s ripe for innovation. And that’s important, because if it’s not ripe for innovation, we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing. We will not be able to be very successful by only doing what the market leader does.

Next Ballmer says that Microsoft is ready to get in the ring with Google:

Second strategy for us I call it focus, but in my own mind I think of it as kind of our Mohammed Ali, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee strategy. Pick focused areas of search, really innovate, change those areas, differentiate from the market leader. That doesn’t mean Google won’t come back and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Ballmer says blah a lot.

And last, but not least, we will work to reinvent the user model and the business model. I know this from past experience, it’s often harder for the guy who is market leader to reinvent their category than it is for somebody who is, so to speak, the Avis of the business, number two and trying harder.

Of course, competing in search is all about making a profit from ad dollar$.

We need more relevant ads. It turns out that one of the big advantages the market leader has is they have more advertisers in their system.

You don’t say?

So if you look at two pages today, one from Google and one from Microsoft, the thing that’s perhaps most interesting is, because they have more people bidding on advertising, they have more opportunity to serve up a relevant ad. A lot of our discussion around Yahoo! really centered as much on this issue as any other issue. How do we get enough advertisers to have a pool of advertising to change the whole advertising approach.

Buy AOL, whose Platform-A is the leading online ad network? Pony up the money for Yahoo?

And last, but not least, we’re going to have to invest in search and advertising, in fantastic brand, and fantastic marketing.

That’s two last but not leasts. Not sure which not least is the most not least.

Later, Ballmer handed over the stage to Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President heading up Microsoft’s search, MSN and ad platform engineering efforts.

When it comes to best results, we have to ante up to create the core infrastructure. That allows us to have a very rich index, a deep and broad index, that helps us actually experiment on the relevance improvements, which is a continuous game. You can think of it as, like, drug discovery, where you continuously are in the game of improving your relevance.

So we have made progress on all of those. In fact, if you look at it, last fall is when we reached a huge milestone for us. We increased the index many-fold. Our relevance improved. We today believe we are comparable to the best in the United States when it comes to the core relevance. And that was not something that we could have said last year at this time when you were here. So that’s substantial progress.

Nadella echoed a Yahoo researcher’s recent article on Semantic search. Microsoft acquired semantic search company Powerset earlier this year.

We think the Search experience is going to evolve to really understand the query intent, as well as the document content, in rich ways. So this is where we’re building the algorithm and capabilities to be able to get to that deeper level of semantic understanding, natural language understanding, so that we can really help users of search engines with their tasks, because nobody does queries in isolation. Queries are always done in the context of some task.

Microsoft has big plans for image search:

One of the nice things about our image search is that we’ve been able to sort of take an experience where we have infinite scroll capability, so you can – you don’t have to paginate to be able to see, you know, hundreds of thousands of images. You can just keep going down. And we have a nice experience for infinite scroll here.

Want to refine those images searches? Ok.

We have the ability for you to refine by size. So if I’m looking for a specific size, I can refine that and find that. So in the case I’m looking for some large images, I can look for color. So if I’m looking only for black and white, I can go ahead and hit black and white. And if the demigods smile, I will actually get that. So, in any case, the idea is to be able to have rich filtering capabilities with your image search to get filtering.

The other thing that I can also do is to be able to drag and drop. I can open up the scratch pad and I can go ahead and drag and drop these images and make a new collection, because if I wanted to come back to a collection of images that I used in this project, then I can have a series of collections.

No offense, but that’s not innovative. That’s done by Google and Flock, too.

That’s ok. Let’s just move on to video search.

One of the things that we have done, working with MSR, Microsoft Research, is to do what we’ve done, all of us in the Search business have done for Web search, in terms of creating previews of content before you click on the link. We’ve done that for video. So we crawl all of the videos on the Web.

We created something called the Smart Motion Thumbnails, which, in fact, are basically summaries of video content out there. And we call them Smart Motions because we can actually do scene detection. So if it’s a news clip, we can actually summarize the news clip. If it’s a video of a sports event, we can make sure that we do the scene detection to get the complete shot, and what have you. So this is – so all you have to do is hover over the video. You get the summary before you actually click on it. And this is, again, best in class or first in class when it comes to creating video summaries that are semantically smart.

Just to compare that to what Google has, Google has, you know, a video search product where they have images. They don’t have the summary capability. The one other difference is the selection. If you look at our selection, we have from MSN, AP, MSNBC, you know, and CNBC, ESPN — lots of different sources, as well as YouTube – whereas the selection in video for Google is a lot more biased toward their own owned-and-operated indexes.

Nadella moves on to talk about travel search. This must be part of Ballmer’s ideas about focusing on specific parts of search and innovating them:

Whenever you’re booking a flight, one of the specific things you’re looking for is to time your purchase. We know that airline fares are volatile, so the idea of being able to purchase when we think is the best time to get the best fare is fairly critical. So in this case, if I go ahead and click flights from Seattle to San Francisco, what I do is I get back on something called an Instant Answer. It says that there are many results of flights from Seattle to San Francisco. It also has this prediction algorithm.

Enter in the Farecast acquisition and re-launch.

In this case, it looks like it’s a good time to buy. Let’s go ahead and look at the actual flights. It takes me to something called a Smart Calendar. I can actually pick the date pair, so when I want to leave and when I want to come back. So let’s say I want to leave Thursday and I want to come back on Saturday; I can go ahead and do that. I will hit Find Flights. And at this point, Farecast is going out to all the agencies and all the airlines and bringing back search results that meet the criteria of the dates I picked.

But Microsoft’s plans for the HP Toolbar is where they hope to take some precious market share away from Google.

How do we really get more people to know about Live Search and get the taste for some of the value, like, in particular, the cashback value? So the place where we are innovating is in the toolbar. We have recently done a distribution deal for our toolbar with Hewlett-Packard. So this is the toolbar that Hewlett-Packard will carry with some customizations of their own. It’s the MSN toolbar.

And so let’s say I’m on Google and I type in Xbox. I can go ahead and search for Xbox, and automatically the toolbar detects that you’re searching for Xbox on Google and a Gleam view that there is a cashback on Live Search. And so I can go ahead and at this point click on that Gleam and it’ll take you to Live Search, or it’s supposed to take you to Live Search. Oh, it is on Live Search. See, I didn’t even notice the transfer. So it’s so seamless that now you’re on Live Search. You can get the cashback for a particular Xbox that you want to buy. So that’s just an experiment on how we get the word out, get more users trying Live Search, and getting the value of things like Live Search cashback.

What do you think of Microsoft plans? Can they gain market share? Let it fly in the comments.

Yang to Yahoos: One Team, One Voice

We’re not sure what the long-term implications of the Yahoo-Yang-Icahn settlement will be. In the short term, though, the agreement that ended the impending proxy fight appears to have inspired Jerry Yang to use capital letters in his memos to employees.

Here’s the full text of Jerry Yang’s take on the Icahn affair.

Today, Yahoo! moves past a distracting proxy contest. This morning we announced a settlement with Carl Icahn which will enable Yahoo! to put an end to this challenging chapter in our history, and allow us to get back to the business at hand – building our business and maximizing value for all stockholders.

Over the past few weeks we’ve made progress communicating with investors, helping them to better understand our roadmap for long-term growth, our valuable combination of assets, and our solid position in the converging search and display marketplaces. These discussions have been productive for everyone.

Under the terms of the settlement with Mr. Icahn, he has withdrawn his nominees for consideration at the annual meeting, and has agreed to vote his Yahoo! shares in support of the Board’s nominees. At our annual stockholder meeting on Aug. 1, we’ll ask stockholders to re-elect eight of our current directors. (In connection with the settlement of the proxy contest, Bobby Kotick has notified the Company that he will not stand for re-election to the Board.) After the annual meeting, Mr. Icahn will be appointed to our Board. We’ve also agreed to expand our Board to make room for two additional members to be chosen by the Board upon the recommendation of the Board’s Nominating and Governance Committee from a list that includes the rest of Mr. Icahn’s slate and Jon Miller, former Chairman and CEO of AOL.

We’re pleased that both parties were able to work together productively to accomplish this settlement, and we look forward to working with the new Board members and benefiting from their fresh perspective.

Yahoo! is now moving forward with one team and one voice, and we’re excited about what the future holds.

Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo

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