Marketing Pilgrim

Carl Icahn is a powerful and extremely rich man. Companies that count him as a shareholder likely quake in their boots anytime he has something to say. However, Yahoo’s board is not impressed with Icahn’s threats to replace the board members with a selection of his own.

In their public reply to Icahn, Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board Roy Bostock pretty much tells him to go take a long walk off a short pier.

A fair-minded review of the factual record leads to one conclusion: that Yahoo!’s ten-member board, comprised of nine independent directors along with Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang, remains the best and most qualified group to maximize value for all Yahoo! stockholders.

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Do you know how illusionists make that cute bunny disappear? They distract your eyes with something else, so you don’t notice what’s going on.

Cue Yahoo “Copperfield” with its attempt to make Carl Icahn disappear by distracting you with the good news about a partnership it just formed with mega-ad agency WPP.

In a statement, the companies said that as part of the deal, WPP advertising agencies would, through its 24/7 Real Media arm, develop a proprietary advertising media trading platform that takes advantage of Yahoo’s Right Media exchange.

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In internet marketing circles, there are a handful of names that pretty much everyone should recognize; Danny Sullivan, Dr. Ralph Wilson, and Larry Chase are among them.

What? You’ve never heard of Larry Chase?

That might be understandable, if you only ever get your marketing insight via blogs–Larry Chase doesn’t have a blog. But, if you’re open to receiving an old-fashioned email newsletter, then you’ll find weekly treats and advice in his weekly Web Digest For Marketers publication.

In particular, you’d know the 12 hottest internet marketing trends for the next 3 years, which include:

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Here’s a riddle for you. How many employees does it take to grow Ask.com’s audience by 11%?

Answer: Apparently just 20.

It’s no joke! Ask.com has just announced it will acquire Lexico, owners of Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, in a move that will increase its audience by a whopping 11%.

Lexico has just 20 employees!

No financial terms have been released, but seeing as Lexico had been in talks with Answers.com for $100 million–the deal fell through last year–we suspect it to be in the same price range.

So, what are the integration plans?

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While I’m pretty confident why CBS is acquiring CNET, I’m stumped when it comes to why Comcast is acquiring Plaxo.

The Plaxo blog tells us…

Comcast has an exciting vision to bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers. Together, we will be able to help users connect with all the people they care about, across all of the devices they use, with all the media they love to consume, create, and share.

But all I hear is the loud sound of the chart below–showing that perhaps Plaxo just wanted to sell before it became the latest contestant on Dancing With the Stars. That is where the washed-up stars end-up, right?

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CBS is paying a 45% premium in order to buy CNET for $1.8 billion!

Why?

Why would they offer up a 45% premium for a company that’s seen its stock slump recently? Let’s speculate shall we?

1. CBS had money burning a hole in its pocket.
2. CNET had more than one suitor, so enjoyed a behind the scenes bidding war.
3. CBS wanted to offer enough of a premium to satisfy its grumbling investors.

My vote is on option 3–with maybe a little of option 1. CBS will clearly benefit from CNET’s vast footprint in online media, but I believe the premium is likely an attempt to avoid any conflict with CNET’s dissenting investors.

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If you buy Radically Transparent–or download chapter 1 for free–you’ll learn how JetBlue’s reputation was severely damaged when it stranded passengers for hours in February 2007. The company had to do a lot of apologizing and reputation repair–including the creation of a YouTube video and a passenger bill of rights.

The crap just hit the jet turbine again.

This time, JetBlue is accused of making a passenger give-up his seat and instead spend part of the flight sitting in the bathroom.

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Don’t you wish you could get more information from those that fill out your web site’s contact form? How did you find us? What search engine did you use? Where are you?!?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing the appropriately named "Best Contact Form "–appropriate, because it is the best contact form I’ve ever used!

OK, all the basics are there–name, email, captcha, etc–but Best Contact Form throws in a bunch of really useful analytics too!

Here are just some of the cool features it offers:

• Learn the actual keywords people are typing in that convert on your site.

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Fortune magazine has one of the most comprehensive “Google’s starting to fall apart” articles, I’ve seen in a long time.

Sure, it’s easy to suggest that Google has become too big, too arrogant, and has lost its original focus, but Fortune’s (long) article does a great job digging down and explaining why many are saying just that.

There were two things that really stuck out to me.

First, even Google’s biggest partners are concerned that the company is a one-trick (AdWords) pony. Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff puts it perfectly:

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Good Monday morning Pilgrims!

I trust you had a good weekend and were nice to your mom. Now that you’re back at work, it’s time to catch up on the latest internet marketing news Picks:

• TechCrunch is reporting a rumor that Google will launch a new set of APIs today called "Friend Connect," allowing you to pull profile data from social networks.
• While Facebook is welcoming Google employees through the front door, its own CTO and co-founder Adam D’Angelo is burnt-out and leaving the company via the back door.

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There’s a buzz in the blogosphere over the launch of Powerset, a natural language processing search engine that uses Wikipedia for its index. Either I’ve not had enough coffee this morning or I’m the only one that’s asking these pointed questions.

1. Didn’t Ask.com try natural language search? Didn’t it fail?
2. Didn’t Google spend the last 10 years conditioning search engine users to use a handful of keywords–not natural language?
3. Isn’t Wikipedia made up of just 2.3 million pages, while Google’s index is likely 40+ billion? Even I could build a search engine that scales to 2.5 million edited and organized web pages.

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Matt Cutts was invited to speak at the Web 2.0 conference on the subject of search engine spam. Matt also tries to differentiate legitimate "SEO" from "spam"–so you might want to thank him, when you next see him.