He’ll get something of a list of titles and duties while there.  "Vice president of product development" will correspond directly to LiveJournal.  A release states that he’ll also work as the director of product development for SUP, which owns LiveJournal, and serve on SUP’s executive committee.

These sorts of thing should, to abandon (and/or mix) the fish metaphor, be right up Shellen’s alley; he used to manage business and product strategy for the creators of Blogger.  Then, following Google’s acquisition of Pyra Labs, he became the founding product manager of Google Reader.

LiveJournal has had an unusual number of ups and downs in the past year, with account suspensions and the sale to Russian SUP being two of the more important events.  It’ll be interesting to see if the addition of Shellen helps smooth out the operations in any way.
 

The terms of the transaction haven’t been disclosed, so it’s hard to say exactly what took place.  Both sides have been more than willing to discuss what a wonderful development this is, though.

Worried about a lack of experience?  SUP has been working on the Russian version of LiveJournal for over a year, and every member of Six Apart’s LiveJournal team should stay with the product as it transfers hands.  Also, even though LiveJournal’s founder, Brad Fitzpatrick, has begun to work at Google, he will serve on a freshly-formed LiveJournal Advisory Board along with elected members of the LiveJournal community.

What about Russian censorship?  “SUP . . . reassured the community that while subscribing to a minimalist approach in managing the site, it will establish clear and concrete policies with regard to communication and consultation on issues vital to the community,” according to a formal statement.  Also, we should return to the fact that SUP has already been running some operations for about 13 months.

Meanwhile, Six Apart may be able to pay more attention to Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox, and has promised that “substantial growth” will take place in 2008.

Site Match is clearly an attempt to monetize web search beyond the boundaries dictated by various relevancy algorithms. The first problem Yahoo faces when presenting Site Match is that they have to insist that paid listings will be treated the same as unpaid listings. This is one way that Yahoo can justify integrating these two into the main index. If Yahoo cannot successfully make this claim, then the FTC might be in a position to exercise their consumer protection mandate, and declare that Yahoo’s Site Match amounts to deceptive advertising.

Another way of satisfying the FTC would be to conspicuously label the paid listings so that consumers are properly informed. But the evidence suggests that Yahoo has no intention of doing this. The screen shot on the right is taken from Yahoo’s description of the difference between Pay-for-Performance and Site Match. The former is similar to Google’s AdWords program, where ads are labeled “sponsor results” and payment and position are determined by bidding. These are followed by algorithmic “web” results.

The clear implication is that one is paid and the other is unpaid. Google keeps the two types separate, and Microsoft hinted that their engine, due out in early 2005, may also keep them separate. Yahoo, on the other hand, plans to infiltrate Site Match into the algorithmic listings to make even more money. From this screen shot, and from the scuttlebutt on the forums, it appears that within the main index, the paid and unpaid results will all look the same to the consumer. The new format should become clearer after April 15.

Without labeling, Yahoo is compelled to emphasize that the Site Match listings will be ranked by relevancy exactly the same as the unpaid listings. I’m not convinced this is true. Google is not convinced this is true. Ask Jeeves is not convinced this is true. And Microsoft is not convinced this is true. Even if you think these last three are just tooting their own competitive horns, there are good reasons to be suspicious.

For one thing, Yahoo’s crawler is an underperformer. There are massive holes in Yahoo’s index. There are numerous examples of poor and erratic crawling by Slurp, their crawler, and assuming that the page was crawled to begin with, even worse indexing in Yahoo. This is true of nonprofit sites as well as many commercial sites. Yahoo guarantees a crawl every 48 hours for Site Match customers, using a dedicated crawler. Their poor unpaid crawling therefore provides an incentive to join Site Match, for those who can afford it. As long as this is the case, it also provides a disincentive for Yahoo to improve their unpaid crawling. Of course, in the long term Yahoo has to look like a real search engine, and eventually their unpaid crawling must improve.

Up to this point, there is no evidence that Yahoo is looking that far ahead, despite some rhetoric from Yahoo representatives on various forums. There have been some noises about Yahoo reaching out to acquire the “deep web” by absorbing databases from the Library of Congress and National Public Radio. Translated, this means that nonprofits might qualify for a free “trusted feed,” which would mitigate the poor crawling of the noncommercial sector. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo is simply spewing more rhetoric, or if they are serious about becoming a real search engine. So far Yahoo has not published any details or procedures for implementing this nonprofit trusted feed.

Yahoo is adding pay-per-click on top of their $49 annual fee for Site Match. The annual fee is per page, but drops to $29 each for two to ten URLs on a domain, and $10 for eleven or more. Each click is from fifteen cents to thirty cents. This is very expensive! Much of the discussion on ecommerce forums revolves around what sort of control webmasters will have over which clicks are charged to their account. There will be some geolocation control, but apparently no keyword control. Yahoo is touting the 48-hour crawl and the advanced reporting that come with Site Match listings.

The quick crawl is attractive to search engine optimizers, because they can get excellent feedback on their page tweaks, and adjust them to fit Yahoo’s algorithms. Although it requires some effort by the webmaster, this will, over time, almost certainly result in some ranking advantage for Site Match pages. It’s still rather expensive, however, and most commercial webmasters are taking a wait-and-see approach toward Site Match.

Ultimately, Yahoo’s claim that Site Match will not skew the rankings places the burden of proof squarely on Yahoo. The proxy on this site is tracking the pay-for-inclusion links that Yahoo ported from Inktomi. It shows that these links, for whatever reason, enjoy an average ranking advantage. If Yahoo insists on corrupting the main index with paid listings, then they should monitor the ranking differential, and impose a correction for Site Match rankings so that this differential approaches zero. Without such a system, Yahoo will have a tough time convincing me that Site Match has no influence on ranking.

The larger issue is why Yahoo feels the need to monetize the main index at all. This is a bad precedent, and one that Yahoo has not thought through very well. If Yahoo cannot make sufficient money on labeled listings riding on top of a pure unpaid index, then why assume that goosing the index with Site Match will yield even more golden eggs? There are some very fundamental contradictions in Yahoo’s approach. It looks like an approach designed by a loose committee of greedy MBAs eager for promotion, which was then imposed on vice-presidents hungry for the next tech bubble.

This week Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer announced that their new search engine will be launched in about a year. He also regrets that Microsoft waited so long to get started. What this means for Yahoo is that they have a captive platform for another year to help establish their reputation for web search. Until then, Microsoft is trapped between Yahoo’s Overture for ads, and Yahoo’s Inktomi for algorithmic search, and has nowhere else to go.

Clearly, Yahoo is in a turf war with Google. Who could want more than the combined platforms of Yahoo and MSN for a year, plus whatever remains of Alltheweb and AltaVista, to wage this war? Yahoo’s exposure is very high (about half of their total revenue is from search-related activities), and many of their cards are already face-up on the table. If they don’t show that they are committed to pure search excellence within the next twelve months, it will be impossible to recover.

Right now it looks like they have their priorities backwards. Yahoo is copying Google on the cheap, in an effort to rapidly expand their ad revenue. Instead, they should be committing more resources to noncommercial, informational, pure algorithmic search. The first step in this process would be to dump the entire Site Match program.

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Then I asked: “Okay, but what exactly does that mean? What is the new world sales model, as you see it?” The lively conversation following that fateful question brought us to three key conclusions about what I have come to call “New World Sellingtm”. The conclusions are summarized briefly below.

Warning: If you are uncomfortable with the notion that salespeople at all levels must now, more than ever, use technology to initiate, maintain and grow business relationships, you are likely to be disappointed with the following conclusions:

Conclusion #1: Technology can (and should) drive down the cost of the average sales call.

The cost of making a “face-to-face” sales call and presentation has been on the rise for the past ten years and is now sitting somewhere around $800 per visit. That’s if the contact works at a centrally organized business venture that you can drive to. Add the inevitable complexities (multiple offices, far-flung locations, and 101 technical questions requiring not only your physical presence but also that of some expert or other resource), and the costs run even higher. The airline and hotel industries may not want to hear it, but CEOs who sell (and the smart salespeople who model them) are going to be focusing more heavily on already available technology to move the buying process along. These technologies can and will increase efficiency and consistency while at the same time provide greater control of the cost-of-sales activities.

The face-to-face appointment isn’t dead, of course, but it’s increasingly expensive – and, in today’s wired economy, increasingly irrelevant. The tragic events of September 2001 seem to me to be likely to add momentum to this trend. (Remember all those feature pieces about businesspeople that found creative ways to work around flights they couldn’t take and meetings they couldn’t make?)

The technology I’m talking about is called “media-rich” e-presentations, and they’re incredibly powerful (they should be)! The communications experts say that combining voice, pictures, and text increases retention to a whopping 50%, and that’s exactly what these tools do!)

Conclusion #2: Technology can (and should) help smart organizations boost renewal rates and increase high-margin add-on sales from upselling.

Picture this: You’re selling a product or service that requires renewal – a club membership, a maintenance contract, an insurance policy, whatever. To close this “renewal” sale, you must win your prospect’s “top-of-mind awareness.” The question is; how do you do that?

Sure, you can send a letter with a SASE that will get you the traditional 6% to 10% renewal rate. But, nowadays, you have another choice. You can use technology to contact each renewal customer with an efficient, consistent, and economical voice message that is sincere, well focused and original- and drive your renewal rate up to 60%! Another one of my CEO friends has found a way to use a combination of e-mail, e-voice mail, and good old-fashioned phone calls to pull people to a tailored, Web-based voice and visual slide presentation that viewers control. The result: a staggering contact-to-response ratio and a similarly unreal renewal percentage!

You can use the same basic tactics to upsell to your base of current customers who are not faced with a “renewal” purchase. You’ve got the new product or add-on services that you know can add-value, but you don’t have a way to show them the value that serves the product justice. You don’t want to use something as “common” and “typical” as marketing or sales brochures besides; you’ll have to wait too long to get the piece developed. You can use today’s New World Sellingtm. technology to develop, promote, and deliver a top-notch presentation that talks the talk – and walks the walk – at the customer’s convenience. This is a great way to “wow” your customers — and get the orders coming in.

Conclusion #3: Technology can (and should) give prospects the feeling of being a favored “insider” at your company.

The new tech-driven sales model can shape your prospects’ and customers’ perceptions of your organization. It can deliver the message that your company is accessible, progressive, aware, and serious about moving forward on your goals. Which means that you can help them do something similar or even greater. Here’s one example: Imagine that you want to approach a new prospect – but you don’t just want the person to agree to an in-person meeting. You would like this person to get the “look and feel” of your organization by actually seeing it first-hand, by actually hearing the CEO or some other top player deliver a short presentation of your company’s vision on your behalf. I am not suggesting a web-cam propped in front of your CEO’s desk and then hoisted on the shoulder of some cinematographer as he does a “factory tour.” Nor am I talking about sending an hour-long “Introduction-to-our-company” video for your prospect to avoid watching. I am talking about an existing technology that allows you to tailor a message to each and every one of your prospects with your voice, your CEO’s voice, or anyone else’s! The vocal track matches a set of presentation slides that include pictures and text.

The message my buddy and I ended up talking about for nearly an hour is delivered by e-mail without an attachment. That means the fear of catching a nasty virus or getting past corporate “firewalls” is gone forever.

The New World Selling TM Revolution in Sales Communications

To sell like a CEO, we have to be willing to shake up our assumptions. We have to be willing to ask questions like this: “What can I do right now to create an authentic, more compelling message?”

The New World Sales model I am talking about isn’t just focused on technology, it’s focused on an attitude toward technology. An attitude that says, in essence: “It’s a new world – it’s a new economy – and I am open to the possibility of finding new ways to sell.”

Here’s the point: With today’s technology, you can make “sales calls” for about 10% of what it’s costing you now, save enormous amounts of time, and provide your prospects with an easy way to watch your sales presentation in an accessible “insider” format. They can do it when they want to, as many times as they want to and the result is that you watch revenues go up. That’s the lesson my CEO friend and I have taken from the first-hand experience of using this technology! If that’s not enough, how about knowing precisely when your prospect and/or customer watched it, how long they watched it and where they stopped watching it! Still not enough, how about giving them the opportunity to ask you a question? Finally, how would you like to send a “Thanks-for-taking-the-time-to-watch-the- first-two-minutes-but-you-missed-the-best-part-and-here-it-is” message? And bingo, they’re watching the rest of your presentation.

Don’t take my word for it, though. To find out more about this all-empowering technology visit www.brainshark.com.

In next month’s column we’ll talk about how to couple your e-presentations with authentic, automatically delivered voice mail messages.

See the technology in action

Here’s a special complimentary opportunity for the readers of my monthly column. On Thursday, October 25th from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EST, you’ll be able to hear and watch me virtually present New World Sellingtm. tools using media-rich technology. The “classroom” will fill up quickly! Register early to reserve your “seat” at: www.brainshark.com. Click-on “Seminar”, look for “Anthony Parinello”, and then follow the easy registration instructions. If you are unable to attend the live October 25th presentation, you can access the archived seminar
after October 27th by visiting www.brainshark.com.

Anthony Parinello is the author of the best selling book Selling to VITO: The Very Important Top Officer. For additional information on his Sales Success Kits and speeches and his newest book, Think and Sell like a CEO call 1-800-777-VITO or visit http://www.sellingtovito.com