I have always loved Yahoo! I want them to succeed. I love that Yahoo! launched a corporate blog! There are a few areas of concern from my future vantage point as a Chief Customer Officer of an innovative and creative organization though that I’d like to work to iron out.
Top 10 9 Questions the Yahoo! Corporate Blog Raises (and I’d like to see discussed in the next 30 days there):
1) Of most importance, in the video in the first post there is a purple cow to the right of the door as you enter. It looks a like a cow from the Chicago Cows on Parade a few years ago. However, to my recollection, there were no purple cows in the original herd. Could you please take some still pictures of this cow, post them and research it’s travels, paintings and history? I’d like to know. Thanks for your time. Does Seth Godin play any role? I would l like to know whether people see a piece of Chicago everyday as they walk in!!!
2) I’m sure Nicki Dugan, Senior Director of Corporate Communications, is real cool Yahoo! and all but an official corporate blog in a large corporation should be the brainchild and steward of the C-level suite with numerous other blogs throughout the organization available to micro-audiences. The PR department is just one blog of many in the corporation of the future.
Why? In the coming customer listening revolution, the C-level suite needs to be doing more customer listening and this involves massive amounts of change management to change from primarily strategy driven initiative thinking. Regardless of the business, this requires understanding, responsiveness and executive sponsorship and accountability for change management from C-level leaders. Peter Drucker said many brilliant things in his lifetime, among them was “Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.”
3) I need your help as your new blog confuses me a bit in terms of Yahoo’s branding. At the Internet Retailer conference a senior Yahoo! executive told me that the corporate colors were now purple and white only, no longer yellow. Yet the video and your blog have the old yellow on it. Could you please clarify this issue, communicate it publicly and change your blog theme appropriately if necessary? Thanks.
4) Yahoo owns a blog product called Yahoo! 360, a blogging service. The Yahoo! “corporate blog” uses WordPress, the Yahoo Search blog uses Typepad. I find it a bit odd that Yahoo! isn’t using this product or discussing why it isn’t. Could you dig into a discussion of this issue?
5) Nicki, where is your contact info on the blog? You said you read Naked Conversations, putting your contact info on your blog was an important point in the book.
6) From a risk management and business continuity standpoint, it would seem that having Yahoo!’s network operations center in Sunnyvale might not be the best location due to the earthquake risks. A place like Chicago, Cleveland or even North Dakota might make more sense for this function? Will my Yahoo! Mail and experience be disrupted when the next big quake hits? If not, please prove it to me, I’d like to know and understand this better as I’m sure many net citizens would.
7) Speaking of Yahoo! Mail, lately my spam filtering hasn’t been so hot. Many messages that aren’t spam are categorized as such while significant amounts of real spam get through. What is the plan to remedy this and improve that experience? As Mail is one of Yahoo!’s primary retention tools, I would love more transparency and communication than has been provided so far on this important issue.
8) When will del.icio.us results be integrated into the search functionality for relevance? 🙂 I’m excited about this possibility, but will it even be executed?
9) Could you please enable the trackback functionality on your blog?
I forgot what that 10th item was, please forgive me. Several of these topics are ideal for guest bloggers by the way. Thanks for participating and listening, I hope Terry Semel and some other great Yahoo!’s join in the conversation. I look forward to a dialougue on these issues with the rest of the blogosphere.