Yahoo chief operating officer, Dan Rosenweig recently addressed a group from Advertising Weekly at the Museum of Radio and Television on Tuesday. During his speech, he covered the basic model for Yahoo, their four pillars as he called.
Online Minute at MediaPost explained it nicely at their site:
Search: Tools for finding, organizing, displaying, and publishing relevant content, information, and images. These include mobile, video, desktop, TV search functions and more.
Content: Tools and resources for enabling consumers and businesses to find, create, use, watch, listen to, buy, enhance, manipulate, and share content. Basically, this is Yahoo!’s way of saying, “We want to help you do something with content — anything you want.”
Community: Functions and features to help people connect with one another via groups, instant messaging, and more. There are currently 100 million Yahoo! IM users, by the way. The feature “My Web” reveals what fellow community members read and enjoy. The community, in essence, becomes a filter for preferences, and helps us navigate our way through what Peter Weedfald, Samsung’s head of marketing, calls the “ADD [attention deficit disorder] economy.”
Personalization: Features like “My Yahoo!,” which Rosensweig says 60 million people use globally, and “My Media,” are about what he calls “discoverability.” Personalization and customization features are what will ultimately help marketers build relevant and engaging messages. “We will know more about consumers, not less,” through these types of features, Rosensweig says. In addition, automatic synchronization, which is the synchronizing of all devices across multiple platforms, will enable the streamlining of all information, including consumers’ dislikes and likes.
Rosenweig emphasized flexibility is a must for a business like Yahoo because the Internet can change so quickly. He said it’s difficult to plan 1 month ahead, let alone five years.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
