Posts by Nichola Stott

Nichola Stott is owner and co-founder of theMediaFlow; online revenue optimisation and audience services (including SEO, SEM and SMM). Prior to founding theMediaFlow, Nichola spent four years at Yahoo! as head of UK commercial search partners. More articles and bio from Nichola Stott
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Brand SEO: Tips for building equity off-site

We’ve all heard how important it is to “own your page one” and “lock out your brand SERP” and suchlike. I am a big believer in brand SEO myself, as from my perspective the plus-sides are not just limited to the ability to dominate a few pages of Google for a search on your brand name. Numerous additional benefits can be had, from the SEO benefits of citation/link matrix – to the traditional marketing benefits of brand and message ownership; most are pretty simple to achieve… (more…)

Social Gaming – The Next Web Economy

An interview with Oliver Lo, Senior Marketing Manager, XPD Media/Vojo World – creators of Medical Mayhem, Vice Central and Pixie Pets.

Oliver is Senior Marketing Manager at Vojo World. In that role he oversees brand positioning, viral marketing and monetization strategy for their social gaming products. Previous to that Oliver worked in advertising in London where he worked on brand campaigns for clients such as Ikea, Lloyds TSB and Virgin.

I recently met Oliver after seeing him on a panel at Social Media World Forum in London a few weeks ago. I was struck by how passionately he spoke about the phenomenal growth in this sector; plus the opportunities for brand marketing that such micro-finance models have opened up. When I saw him in the bar at the post-show networking event, I just had to bag an interview!Oliver Lo (more…)

Why Bartz Won’t Sell Yahoo! (Just Yet)

Microsoft want Yahoo! Search… All of it.

It is no secret that Microsoft wants this business, and those who have been in the industry will recall previous attempts, most significantly the shennanigans of 2008, which saw an unsolicited proposal to buy the whole Yahoo! business in February of that year, for $44.6 BN dollars in cash and shares. Following the rejection and counter-position of the offer from Yahoo! to $53 BN, (equivanlent to $33 a share and almost double the then shareprice) Steve Ballmer, in a letter to Jerry Yang, announced Microsoft were pulling out of the offer and would not be willing to meet the asking price.

Later that year an opportunist alliance between activist investor Carl Icann and Microsoft, saw yet another unsolicited bid; this time for the search business only, under the terms that Icahn would depose the board of directors for the remaining Yahoo! business and install a new board of directors under his leadership. Chairman Roy Bostock issued a statement resoundly rejecting the proposal (which was issued with a 24 hour response deadline) on grounds that a carve-up of the business would be damaging and undervalued the company’s assests. Again the “buy the whole company for $33 dollars a share or get lost” message was loud and clear. (more…)

Bing in 2010

Google has nothing short of a strangle-hold on the search engine marketplace. In the UK for example, the last few months has seen Google market share at around 90%, with Yahoo! and Bing around 3 – 4% each; with the remainder composed of Ask and “other.”

Despite these percentages many search professionals agree that even when rankings are fairly stable across each search engine, it seems like Google drives way more traffic pro-rata, than its competitors. With the sheer volume of traffic coming from Google, it is usually more rewarding to spend all your efforts pushing a page two-listing up a place, rather than getting to the top spot on Bing. (more…)

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