The battle for supremacy in the Internet era is entering a tumultuous new phase. Microsoft Corp. placed a bold $44.6 billion bet that buying Yahoo Inc. can transform both companies’ flagging efforts to catch Google Inc. The software giant’s unsolicited offer for Yahoo represents a 62% premium over the Internet company’s recent share price and is a sign of Microsoft’s determination to narrow Google’s growing lead in the online advertising and Web search-engine wars.
Lots of people have ideas about the best way to reach influencers but Rick Bruner, Director of Research and Industry Relations for Doubleclick, gives three quick tips for how to reach the people who affect the thoughts of others.
You can’t really control what the blogosphere says about your brand, but with these simple steps you can exert more influence. As we learned, there are essentially two kinds of bloggers that are relevant to your brand marketing, which we call Holmeses and Watsons. The Holmes blogger is a subject matter expert (SME) with deep knowledge in a narrow field. The Watson is not an SME, but does have an incredible breadth of audience. The two bloggers really need each other in order for either to be successful.
In a bold move to counter Google’s online pre-eminence, Microsoft said Friday that it had made an unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo for about $44.6 billion in a mix of cash and stock. If consummated, the deal would redraw the competitive landscape in Internet consumer services, where both Microsoft and Yahoo have both struggled to compete with Google.