2. Yahoo! History The company was founded in February 1994 by Stanford PhD students, David Filo and Jerry Yang. The pair of students started Yahoo! out of a trailer on campus as a way to organize the information on the internet that interested them. One day in the fall of 1994, Yahoo! observed its first ‘one million hit day’! Today, Yahoo! employs nearly 13,200 people and enjoys 600 million Yahoo! visitors.
3. Yahoo! Business Values and Goals Yahoo! is all about excellence, innovation, customer fixation, teamwork, community, and fun! Given these attributes, Yahoo! is determined to give the everyday individual the information they need to get what they want and seek in the ‘Internet World’.
4. The ‘Big Picture’ for Yahoo! The goal for Yahoo! right now is promotion. Today, it seems that sites like Google and Bing are gaining more ground in terms of publicity. To aid Yahoo! with its promotions, I’ve developed a campaign idea to use different social media websites to get the ‘Yodel’ of Yahoo! out into the public mainstream.
5. Yahoo! and YouTube A good way for Yahoo! to promote itself better would be to make a connection with an established social media site like YouTube. Yahoo! could make special promotional ads and tutorial videos for some of the Yahoo! functions that are not as readily familiar to the general public. (i.e. Yahoo! Finance) Posting videos on YouTube is relatively cheap, so this would be a good way for Yahoo! to promote itself without sacrificing a large portion of their budget.
6. Facebook and Yahoo! Yahoo! could also get involved with social media hit Facebook. With Facebook, Yahoo! could develop a video game on the Facebook site that would promote their company and enhance their brand image.
7. Yahoo! and Twitter Twitter, being one of the more popular social media sites on the web, could really help Yahoo! with their promotions. Yahoo! could designate a representative from their company to be an ‘official tweeter’ for all things Yahoo!. In turn, a separate Twitter site could be formed where a Yahoo! representative could ‘tweet’ fun and interesting facts about Yahoo! along with answering any questions about a number of the different subsidiaries on the Yahoo! site.
8. Metrics of Success for Yahoo! One of the keys to evaluating the success of this campaign would be to have Yahoo! develop a web tracking system to track how many ‘hits’ each website is getting. In doing so, the progress of the marketing campaign as a whole can be assessed accordingly. Designing a program like this will be crucial to find out if Yahoo! is targeting the appropriate market(s) that it is after.
