News on Social Marketing, according to Marketing Land, Yahoo just netted $4.5 billion in cash, after taxes, on the sale of roughly half of its interest in Alibaba for $7+ billion. Initially purchased for $1 billion, the company owned roughly 40 percent of the Chinese e-commerce company. Now, it owns 20 percent of interest in Alibaba which they will ultimately sell entirely.
The sale is the result of an earlier agreement reached between the companies in May.
Marissa Mayer, the new Yahoo CEO, has been giving every Yahoo employee a smartphone (iPhone 5, Android or a Nokia Lumia 920), other than a BlackBerry and she is also hiring new female executives to her team lately. At the company’s Sunnyvale, CA headquarters, she is even giving free food to Yahoo employees. To improve working conditions and employee morale, workspace changes has also been made.
For several years now, Yahoo has been losing ground to both Google and Facebook. Although Yahoo has a number of successful properties and programs, the main goal of the new CEO is to attract more consumers and advertisers.
An internal memo from the new CEO has been published by Business Insider on what the company would do with the $4.3 billion cash. The memo shows that the company will be returning approximately $3.65 billion to shareholders. The $3 billion will come from the proceeds of the sale while the $646 million will come from the down payments made over the past few months in the form of stock buybacks.
At the end of Q2 of 2012, Yahoo had about $2 billion in cash and cash equivalents on hand compared to Google’s $15 billion.
Read more at Yahoo’s Sale Of Alibaba Assets To Net Company $4.5 Billion Cash Infusion (Updated)
News on Social Marketing, according to Marketing Pilgrim, having a worthy and reliable product will earn the respect of a consumer and once a respect is earned, consumers will most likely recommend your product to friends and family. Personal recommendation is vital when it comes to information about a product or brand.
The problem with earned advertising is that you can’t have a schedule for it. It comes when it comes. This is where “paid” and “owned” advertising comes in.
Right now, tablets and mobile phones are the latest trends in technology, but consumers are not pretty much interested in the ads they see there. This only shows that consumers are not much on “paid” advertising.
Trust factor are much higher in billboards and radio. Almost breaking the 50% mark are the magazines and TV ads compared to the banner ads, social network ads and online video ads, which all came below 36%.
“Owned” ads such as blogs and email are being trusted more by consumers. However, Nielsen suggested, that to engage your audience, you must combine your earned, owned, and paid forces. This can be achieved when you let people leave reviews on your website or using paid ads to drive traffic to your blog.
This was done by Facebook when they put that line, about how many of your friends also like an ad, to the bottom of their display.
Read more at In Advertising, Consumers Trust Earned Over Owned
News on Social Marketing, according to Reuters, early this year, Facebook launched Facebook Offers, a free service that allows retailers and other local merchants send deals to their Facebook fans. Now, Facebook Inc will be making profits from this service by charging businesses to run Offers on its social network.
Depending on the size of a company’s Facebook pages, Facebook will be charging at least $5 on related ads to promote each Facebook Offer to a targeted audience of fans.
After going public in May, Facebook shares have lost about 40 percent of their value since the IPO and are under pressure from Wall Street to generate more revenues for the giant social network company.
Because retailers are taking advantage of several free tools on the social network to attract customers, commerce potential of Facebook, known as f-commerce, has yet to happen. However, the company intends to change this by making Facebook Offers a paid ad service.
Gokul Rajaram, director of product management for Facebook’s advertising and Pages businesses said that “The best results on Facebook Offers will come from organic distribution plus paid distribution.” He added that, “The requirement to pay for related ads will focus merchants on whom and where they want the offer to reach.”
Before, Offers was only available to merchants with physical locations, but now, it is expanded to online-only businesses. Barcodes that work globally are also added to allow customers redeem offers more easily.
Read more at EXCLUSIVE-Facebook to charge merchants to run Offers
Other Social Marketing Articles of Interest
Survey says healthy content marketing mix drives results
From Post to Pin to Purchase: How TheFancy.com is Changing the Way Social Media Makes Money