David Rice is Yahoo’s new VP of Media Products. In the past, he has worked with Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving. He worked for Yahoo several years ago. Now, a representative for Yahoo tells us, "David Rice will manage the strategy and execution for News, Sports, Finance, Entertainment, Lifestyles and Games product teams."

John Matheny is Yahoo’s new SVP of Communications and Communities. Communications means Mail and Messenger. Communities means Flickr, Answers and Groups. "In this role, he will be responsible for delivering new strategic initiatives while growing and maintaining our best-in-class experiences," Yahoo tells us. 

Bobby Figueroa comes to Yahoo from Google where he had responsibilities under the Product Management and Product Marketing team for all advertising products including AdWords, AdSense, and DoubleClick. He is Yahoo’s new VP of Consumer Advertising Experience. He is now "leading a team of engineers, product managers and user experience experts in charge of delivering the next-generation brand advertising experience in the areas of video, mobile, social and search," the company tells us.  

Todd Papaioannou is Yahoo’s new VP of Cloud Computing. "Todd Papaioannou will be focused on cloud architecture for Yahoo!’s global cloud computing group," says Yahoo. He was previously at Teradata and Greenplum. At Teradata, he drove the whole cloud computing program, he says. 

Finally, Bill Shaughnessy is Yahoo’s new SVP of Product Management. He is responsible for driving ongoing product strategy, product planning and product marketing across Yahoo’s global consumer and advertising products.

Well, according to The Conference Board Reputation Risk Research Working Group and a survey of 148 risk management executives of major corporations, only 49% said that the management of reputation risk was highly integrated with their enterprise risk management (ERM) function.

Maybe the lack of concern is because the role of “reputation risk management” isn’t really something you want your typical risk management guy worrying about–let him worry about the liability insurance and employee identity-cards.

Instead, let the chief PR guy or head of marketing take responsibility for managing and monitoring the company’s reputation management because right now, only 34% of risk managers give a hoot about monitoring social media and a mere 10% actively participate. Can you imagine if your VP of communications informed you that he wasn’t too worried about social media?

The report isn’t all bad news. While risk managers may not quite “get it” they are at least making an effort to better understand reputation management with 81% saying they’ve increased their focus on reputation management over the past 3 years.

Which leads me to a question. Who do you think should be responsible for a company’s reputation management? A risk manager, marketing, PR, or all of the above?

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Preuss isn’t quite as prominent as some of the other departing people; as the product manager for local advertising, he may, for example, be less missed than a key AdSense developer or the vice president of corporate development.  Still, it’s a good bet that Google didn’t want to lose him to Meetup.

Meetup describes itself as the “world’s largest community of local Meetups, clubs and groups.”  Preuss will begin there as the vice president of marketplace.  And in the event that you’re getting even slightly lost in all of this jargon, Peter Kafka interpreted the move.

“In English, that means Dominic is going to try to create a new revenue stream for Meetup by matching sponsors with Meetups, and taking a small cut for itself,” he wrote.  “Smart idea: Right now Meetup sponsorships (Wilson Sonsoni and DFJ Gotham sponsor NY Tech, for example) are done ad hoc, and Meetup doesn’t see a penny of this revenue.”

Given his background at Google, Preuss should definitely know a thing or two about making money.  Hopefully that’ll serve him well at his new job.

I thought that was a great idea and with so many smart marketers reading Online Marketing Blog, I’d like to invite you to share a few of your favorite books on the subjects of marketing online, social media and new media public relations.

I’ll start with the list I sent Rohit which includes a few books that are several years old but most are fairly new or soon to be released:

• The Long Tail - Chris Anderson
• Join the Conversation - Joseph Jaffe
• The New Influencers – Paul Gillin
• The Search – John Battelle
• The New Rules of Marketing & PR – David Meerman Scott
• Now is Gone – Geoff Livingston & Brian Solis
• Do It Wrong Quickly, How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules – Mike Moran
• Search Engine Marketing Inc – Bill Hunt, Mike Moran
• The Corporate Blogging Book – Debbie Weil
• Waiting for Your Cat to Bark – Jeff & Bryan Eisenberg
• The Eyes Have It – Kevin Lee & Steve Baldwin
• Lead Generation for the Complex Sale – Brian J. Carroll
• Duct Tape Marketing – John Jantsch
• Seth Godin’s “Meatball Sundae – Is Your Marketing Out of Synch?” is scheduled for release in December

You can find and order or pre-order all of these books at Amazon or BN.com.

Do you have a recommended reading list of books for better online marketing and PR? Please share in the comments.

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Like most Googlers, Ullah has probably seen a lot of good ideas.  His position with corporate development has likely allowed him to determine which ones work in the real world.  Now, he’ll reportedly put that experience to good use with a venture firm called Merus Capital.

An important note: Ullah is actually founding Merus, not just working for it.  Also, Sean Dempsey, who was a principal at Google’s corporate development group, will be going along.  Otherwise, not much is known about Merus, but Om Malik states that it “is going to focus on small early stage deals.”

As high-ranking Googlers like Ullah, Dempsey, and Benjamin Ling see their bank accounts’ balances rise, they’ll probably continue to depart; so much money provides a safety net while they pursue even more (or, if you’re less cynical, a safety net while they pursue their dreams).

For Google’s competitors, that’s a comforting thought.  For the search giant, not so much.

Let’s start at the attacks – famously on TechCrunch some guy named Ronald is using Justin.tv’s software to lifecast his … well, so-called life. That’s fine. I’ve worn the hat, I’ve done the Jeremy.tv shtick with Justin’s hat … and while I would not do it fulltime, I can appreciate the performance art aspect of it, and think Justin’s done a great job with the shtick.

Jeremy Pepper.tv
Originally uploaded by b_d_solis.

Ronald, though, got into a little (forced) tiff at the movie theater. He wanted to wear his cap and lifecast from the movies … and boy, wouldn’t the MPAA love that. He tried to explain what lifecasting is – and, since I’ve seen Justin explain it, I do know that it’s sometimes a trick to people. When Bryanna politely told Ronald no … he called her a bitch.

Fine. I look at it as typical Detroit self-esteem issues (I know, I was born in that former city). It’s his right to call her a bitch and be unhappy with her treatment of him and his art … but what was the purpose of using Bryanna’s full name? To Google Juice her so that the first thing that comes up is someone calling her a fucking bitch? Um, great.

And, well, it shows a lack of honesty and respect to the "practice" of lifecasting. Anyone that blogs knows that if you have a big enough audience, and use a not "internet famous" person’s name … you will own that name on Google. It just shows a lack of respect or humanity … but what about Bryanna now? Her name is fully linked to that video, and unless she begins blogging or uses a system like ReputationDefender … her name will forever be attached to that While Ronald is going to apologize to her (hey, it’s another chance to do a video!), is that going to show up in Google as well? There is a certain bit of responsibility social media has … and instances like this show a lack of understanding of the esprit de corps of social media. Game over because a simple lack of respect or humanity has not hurt someone else’s online reputation.

Now, here’s a flip side. You’re a young, brash blogger and you’re taking on the world! You’re young, you’re hip … you’re the cat’s meow. And, all these social media PR people – quite a few that have earned their stripes because of projects that they have done, and clients they have worked on – well, they’re old farts that can never understand social media like the young buck you are because you’re that MySpace / Facebook generation.

No, serious. Read about it on David Parmet’s blog – and love well, the attitude.

And, that’s fine. I love a little bit of ‘tude as much as the next person. But, when you are representing a wire service – oh, like Marketwire – does it really behoove you (or the company) to insult and alienate a large group of PR practitioners? You know, I am in the market for a wire service right now, and I have my choices of PR Newswire, Businesswire and PR Web … but Marketwire is not on that list.

Yes, here’s an example of one person’s action resulting in potentially hurting the employer; we can write this off as the impetuousness of youth. We can also point to a fun PC Magazine example … and write that off as a naked emperor incident. Either way, though, the action of employees hurts the corporate parent. Those are just two quickie examples, but the bloggers can (and likely will) steal Google Juice that should be going to the original source. What can corporations do to protect themselves? Well, simple social media and blogging policies should help … but not necessarily do enough. Employees can co-opt a corporations identity and brand, and make it their own. And, while that might sound nice in a social media aspect, we should rather have our brands co-opted by our customers, not the employees.

But, at the end of the day – it is about your own reputation. What do you do if you are a high-level employee at a corporation, and when you leave, the message trolls come out and come attacking? Soon, those results are the top results for your name.

Or, on another, more basic level – it does not even have to be leaving a job or starting a new job – schools are so wired, and people are so networked through networks like Facebook and MySpace, Facebook is searchable via Google (unless you opted-out, which I did) that your reputation is formed both through your own content and what others think of you … and knowing human nature, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Photo by Brian Solis

Now, full disclosure, I used to work for a competitor, but also interviewed both Richard and the head of the US, Pam Talbot and have a view on the firm (it’s below).

His presentation is on how PR is changing, and how we need to change with it. For those basic rules, he points out:

• Transparency
• Dialogue
• Honesty
• Immediacy
• Depth of content
• Updating as you learn
• Journalistic level of accuracy

Okay, it has been an interesting speech. While I don’t agree with all the hires for the ME2Revolution, Edelman (the man and the firm) has pushed the boundary much, much more than any other agency out there. During my round of interviews with both PR firms and start-ups, I was often asked which agencies get it, and I would say three firms immediately: Edelman, MWW and MS&L. While Edelman gets a lot of the press out there (it’s the good stuff you don’t hear about, just the Walmart crap), the people at MS&L and MWW have done great stuff.

And, well, when you do good work, it’s in the background. You should not know about the campaigns (despite claims of transparency and full disclosure, a good campaign is integrated and smooth, and about getting information out to the right audiences).

The job of PR is to not control, but to help move the conversation (old news, wrote about it in the past via Jack O’Dwyer that we need to be the bridge for media, and not pulling the Heisman).

Embrace the issues, adopt to the new reality – it’s about coming together and trust.

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Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about. …

Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.

In contrast, if you’re a smaller site not deemed as important to relevancy, a harsher punishment of a ranking penalty may be dealt out.

Introducing the New, Corporate Web

If they actually follow through with any of this then Google, which touts the value of PageRank, clearly no longer believes in its value. They already show stale data in their toolbar, and might as well scrap the whole thing and start fresh. Their mind control exercise is getting a bit obnoxious.

Now they are editing PageRank and relevancy scores. They don’t edit based on quality of information but based on method of promotion. And if it is a corporation breaking Google’s arbitrary shifting ruleset then Google simply decides not to edit, or only fakes that they care.

Google is Wikipedia, but Worse

With this news of more hand editing, Google also shows that they are biased against small webmasters are and actively trying to screw over small webmasters to increase their corporate profits.

Google is becoming much like the Wikipedia, where generalists wrongly assume topical knowledge greater than that of the real topical experts. In some cases Wikipedia is saved by talk pages and community participation that allow the experts to be heard. Google has no talk page though, which means that Google search results will become a dried out and dumbed down version of the web.

The Real Problem With Half Truths & Hand Editing

The response to every move is a counter move. So if they actually try to squash link buying then webmasters will look for indirect ways to purchase links. Google also offers tips on how to sculpt PageRank, but sculpt to much and suddenly the intent is changed, and you are banned.

Why leave such a thing up to a single Google engineer making a judgement call? If they want to increase the quality of the web they need to be more innovative in encouraging the creation of good content, not make people afraid to invest into creating content only to watch a Google engineer kill it.

Link bait is good when you are a large corporation or are syndicating Google spin, but if you are too successful at link bait they will ban your site for it. They did it to one of my sites and they even banned one of their own site.

If you are a small webmaster and get judged by Google don’t expect compassion. They have no talk page, and they already paid an AdSense publisher to steal all your content. They don’t need you.

How to Do Well in Google

If you are a webmaster assume that Google is lying to you and ignore them. If their view of the web and webmaster advice are reduced to half truths and lies then we can only hope something a bit more honest will come out of their downfall.

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Google Preps Postini For Business World

Google plans to push Postini, the email security firm they purchased, with business customers. They have offered existing Postini customers free use of Google Apps Premier Edition through June 2008, according to an AP report.

Google wants businesses to sign on with its Google Apps service. Fifty dollars annually per user gives them Google Docs and Gmail with a level of support; more importantly, Google does all of the application maintenance and upkeep, including spam filtering.

Email and the sensitivity of its content makes businesses wary of using an email service that isn’t under its direct control. Postini’s customers have used that product to protect existing mail servers.

Google began promoting Postini’s features, as incorporated into Google Apps. Postini enabled Google to offer security and compliance features for mail, including the ability to recover deleted emails on a 90-day rolling basis.

As an added incentive, Google will boost the storage capacity of Gmail for its Apps clients from 10GB to 25GB, according to AP. Along with the Postini security features, Google has a much stronger pitch to offer potential business clients.

It’s still not a Microsoft killer; that’s up to the market to decide. But Google Apps is reaching a level of maturity where it can be reasonably considered. It isn’t just the applications and email features a business would receive, but the ability to lower demands on internal tech staff for application and email support.

Some businesses will find that last part a compelling one, and we’re sure Google will make it a point of discussion during its pitch to the business market.

After all, World of Warcraft and Second Life have set a precedent for successful virtual currencies.  And Michael M. Lazerow, Buddy Media’s CEO, is quick to distance himself from those that haven’t done so well.  “AceBucks is not Beenz, Flooz or [insert your internet currency here],” he writes on the corporate blog.

AceBucks also isn’t a PayPal competitor or something that would challenge any official Facebook payment system, according to Lazerow.  Instead, he plans to seek deals with such businesses.

Then there’s the whole Facebook-at-$15-billion thing to consider.  If the social network is worth that much – stressing the word “if,” mind you – then pretty much anything connected to it is potentially quite valuable, as well.

Am I phoning up Lazerow with my savings account number?  No.  And given how small the balance in that account is, I’m sure he wouldn’t care either way.  But AceBucks is at least an interesting application, and with a fresh $1.5 million behind it, it could become big.

Hat tip to Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer.