Marissa Mayer’s New Yahoo! & Food for Thought on Goofacehoo!
Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has one up on all past Yahoo! CEOs with the announcements of the last couple weeks. She unveiled a brand spanking new Yahoo! landing via NBC’s Today Show, and anyone taking a look at Yahoo! now should be delighted. This, along with Mayer basically adopting the successes of Google Ads in a deal announced earlier this month, certainly paints Mayer as pro-profit and progress. Then there is a PR hiccup to be considered too…
The new Yahoo!
The cleaner, and more user friendly look of Yahoo! really should be the big news. An old time Yahoo! fan, secretly I have rooted for the company to somehow catapult itself back into competing fairly with Google. It never really happened, but I hope still. Competition, you know, just tends to make things better. Mayer professes something about embracing modern paradigms via the Today broadcast, unfortunately somebody over at Yahoo! seems to have fumbled in the media relationship department. Oops.
A super nice “news feel” and Facebook login etc., sure do make the new Yahoo! a contender for my home page again. Somehow that seems secondary for a PR news editor at the moment though. Mayer announcing on an NBC show, when Yahoo! has such a sweet partnership with ABC, now that is either a PR goof or some super-duper-secret business strategy none of us ever heard of.
Not to be too tough on Mayer here, Yahoo! does seem to have a way with somehow influencing CEOs into weird behavior. Mayer’s predecessors all ended up with the Yahoo! screen door hitting them in the seat of their pants, and just over such as the NBC smite here. Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson captured the full facial flub in also pointing out Good Morning America actually has more peeps watching than Today. Wow.
Even despite the apparent goof though, one has to admire what Mayer is up to of late. The new web and mobile looks, deciding to join Google in some ways (if Yahoo! can’t beat em), taking big steps toward at least change – Yahoo! has been mired down for what seems like forever. Hold on though, there’s speculation the whole Melissa Mayer side switch is some Mata Hari Google plan anyhow.
Yes, who knows what will end up being. Experts in some camps say Yahoo! will dump their deal with Microsoft and search any time, and it’s funny the way my signup performed on Yahoo! just before writing this too. I term this screen Yahoogle! But one never knows, maybe in the end we will be paying tribute to Goofacehoo! or? Whatever, Yahoo! is doing better now than in the last four or five years, this is good news.
And the PR firms who work with Yahoo, including Golin-Harris, Peppercomm and Hill & Knowlton should make sure to always include a picture of super-hot Mayer – that’s great PR.
