Behind the Scenes at YSM

I attended a seminar on various aspects of managing Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM, formerly known as Overture) campaigns yesterday. For those of you unfamiliar with YSM, it is a paid search advertising system that allows advertisers to bid for position within the sponsored listings area of several major search engines (including Yahoo,...

U.S. Kids Bad at Geography. Really Bad.

MSNBC ran an AP story today about a recent Roper poll commissioned by National Geographic. Among 510 respondents, aged 18 to 24, 60% couldn’t find Iraq on a map.

Other major findings:

• One-third of respondents couldn’t pinpoint Louisiana on a map and 48 percent were unable to locate Mississippi.
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Yahoo Mail Beta

I logged into my Yahoo! Mail account the other day and was presented with the option to test their new interface. Overall, Yahoo! Mail Beta is pleasant to use and feels like a regular desktop client such as Outlook or Thunderbird. You can read RSS feeds alongside your mail and have the option of forwarding stories to your friends....

Consumerist Empowers Shoppers

Back at my Midwestern high school, state law mandated that students could not graduate without having taken a course called consumer seminar. Though a wholly informative course, after college and graduate school, I can’t really remember much about the course or what we learned. I know that I took it during summer school after my junior year of high school and that we spent our last day in class watching this (awesome) movie called “Breaking Away”...

PR and ROI: A Critical Crossroads

As a practitioner and researcher in the arena of marketing accountability, I am impressed with the latest articles in PRWeek, and other places, about the industry’s growing stress on measurement. It is clear that PR must be concerned about accountability measurement if it is to retain its proper share of corporate budgets....