Long speculated and today a reality, MSN has put out an unsolicited bid to takeover Yahoo in order to become more competitive with Google.

The bid is offering shareholders a 61% premium over it’s close price on Thursday and is offering Yahoo shareholders cash or MSN stock. They did however state that no more than 50% of the sale would be paid out in cash.

Yahoo’s Chairman Terry Semel resigned yesterday and the offer was presented to the board after his resignation. The board promised a swift response.

If MSN gets Yahoo many feel the combination of the two will allow MSN to compete with Google on a more even footing.

I disagree.

The fundamental reasons Google has pulled away from Yahoo and MSN will still exist post acquisition and unless the search platforms at both sites are vastly improved Google will continue to dominate the search advertising space.

According to a poll by Zogby International surveying 3,585 adults conducted from January 21 to January 23 on behalf of the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee(CICAC):

“The Internet has surpassed radio and television as the main source of candidate information. Forty-seven percent of those polled said the Internet is the primary source of their knowledge of the presidential candidates. Just 31 percent and 13 percent cited television and radio respectively as the primary source.

“The Internet has become the ultimate tool for democracy,” said Tim Lordan, executive director of the (CICAC). “The Internet as ‘fundraiser’ has been understood for some time, but the displacement of television and radio as top sources of voter information is a sea change that is destined to advantage the most Internet savvy candidate of the pack.”

Is that a light or a freight train?

It’s been confirmed that Crusaders have Google Bombed the Church of Scientology -

From Webpronews:

An apparent Google bomb aimed at the Church of Scientology is just part of an all-out ideological (holy?) war perpetrated by a group called “Anonymous.”  The rest of the digital war has been carried out via social media as a highly organized and carefully orchestrated Internet campaign that’s getting the group a lot of attention.

It’s learning good lessons from questionable examples, but the Anonymous campaign has a lot to teach us about online campaigns. (Just to be clear, though, not everything highlighted in this article is condoned.)

Yesterday, it came to light that searches for the terms “dangerous cult” brought back the Scientology homepage as the top result in Google – and it apparently took about a week to do that.

The occurrence was interesting because just a year ago, Google announced they’d taken measures that would eliminate the practice. Those measures included not allowing the anchor text in a mass of links to influence ranking if those words did not appear on the targeted homepage. Thus, John Kerry’s website no longer ranked number one for “waffle” and George W. Bush no longer ranked number one for “miserable failure.”

However, the word failure did eventually appear on his website, which served to relight the fuse for the word “failure,” at least for a time. Wikipedia has replaced it since, and so has a site that shall not be named and should not (EVER) be visited. (This is like the big red nuke button. Just trust me when I say that the second result for “failure” should not be clicked.)

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, unsure if it was a true Google bomb, investigated links pointing toward the Scientology homepage, their anchor texts, as well as the keywords on the targeted page. Under Google’s explanation, the Google bomb should only work if the targeted words are actually on the page. Sullivan discovered the word “dangerous,” but not “cult.”

The only use of the word “cult” came from links pointing to the Scientology website.

Then something very interesting happened. In the comments at SEL, a reader points to what appears to be a wiki from Anonymous about how to conduct an all-out media blitz. The master plan includes a Google bomb targeting “dangerous cult,” but also ” brainwashing cult” and whatever keyword supporters wanted to match with “cult.” They also wished to replace Scientology.org with Xenu.net, a site aimed at debunking the religion, as the number one result for the keyword “scientology.” 

Anonymous didn’t achieve the number one ranking they wanted for “brainwashing cult” or for “scientology” …but they did take them up to the third result. Not bad for a brand new effort.

Ideologies, agendas, and holy wars aside, Anonymous launched one heckuva successful campaign. If you look closer at the wiki, members are instructed not to spam. Naturally, spammy tactics are targeted by search engines and everybody else – plus, content matters. But they are instructed to set up blogs, to utilize email, press releases and press release sites, Digg.com, YouTube, and other social networking sites, as well as comments in comment sections (which sort of walk the line on comment spam).

(Spam is encouraged, however, as a weapon, as are denial of service attacks, which seem to be working – as of 3:00 PM today – to shut down the Church of Scientology’s website.)

Part of the reason for the quick success could be that recently Google seems to have placed more weight on buzzy, timely resources, which comes from news sites, social bookmarking, and often social networks and blogs. Google definitely weights Wikipedia, Digg and YouTube pretty heavily.

So what we have here, in a controversial example, is a lesson in buzz creation and SEO. This campaign was highly targeted and highly specific. From the SEO standpoint we can confirm:
Links are crazy important for higher rankings
Anchor text matters
Content matters
Keyword density matters
Link authority matters
Timeliness matters
Generating buzz via social media matters

It also means that a tightly integrated, holistic campaign can make an impact, as utilization of collective media produce a mass effect the search engines (in their current configuration) can’t ignore.

Likely, Google will do something about it.

Valleywag previously reported this rumor and “other sources” are confirming it.

Techcrunch reported Plaxo was for sale and according to John McCrea, VP Marketing at Plaxo:

“For our networked address book service, we’re right around 20 million users, plus another 15 million address book accounts hosted through partnerships.”

And now the New York Times has an article stating Plaxo is for sale and has hired Revolution Partners, a specialty investment bank, to handle the auction. Plaxo is seeking up to $100 million, some have said they may get up to $200 million.

What’s the significance for online political marketing?

Background

Facebook joined the DataPortability workgroup last week, a group of leading engineers from web companies that are working together to develop standards for easily sharing user data between sites and last fall Plaxo started Plaxo Pulse, a service that collects information from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg and others which would fit in nicely with Facebooks desire to let users freely import and export their data from any site. Facebook would become even more of a power house by combining its social networking data with Plaxo’s contact information through its large user base, and via the plugins for email programs Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, and Thunderbird as well as for AIM, among other IM services. Plaxo has created the most universal address book available by giving users the ability to sync their contacts through Plaxo and its plugins for both standard web and Windows Mobile and other mobile operating systems.

If the sale goes through as many are speculating, your or your opponents Facebook data could start to appear in all of these plugins. For example, imagine seeing Facebook’s information about your supporters — their profile information, etc… — with Plaxo’s plugin.

Both Facebook news feed and Plaxo Pulse shows you your supporters (or opponens?) actions - on Facebook - and on other sites, like Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. This feature has been taking off.

While powerful, Facebook will not be the only place that voters share information but by combining with Plaxo; Facebook gains the ability to easily exchange massive amounts of information between it and other services allowing Facebook to push more data into Facebook’s news feeds.

There is some history that needs to be overcome for such a deal to transpire, Parker was booted from Plaxo by its investors, including Sequoia partner Michael Moritz. Parker became Facebook’s visionary first president — and some have credited him with charting much of the company’s innovations. Whether there is bad blood between the two remains up for speculation.  Plaxo has been many investment rounds and management changes — they may be hard pressed to deliver a huge return to its founders, leading engineers and investors.

Unless, of course, Plaxo believes Facebook’s valuation at $15 billion to be accurate.

If you don’t have a Facebook plan and intend to campaign online competitively, it’s time to learn the ropes and develop an online political social marketing plan. 

Spitzer in his State of the State address focused on three key areas to reverse New York’s economic decline:

• Affordable Housing
• Healthcare
• Improving Parks and Infrastructure

New York is already known for having excellent health care even though it may not be evenly available across the state. It’s admirable that Spitzer wants to ensure all citizens of New York have access to healthcare and has initiated a plan to repay loans for family doctors willing to serve in the inner cities and rural areas that are currently underserved. The hope is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

As a small business owner I hired an employee that had medicaid. Had she been willing to work full time for at least a month she would have been eligible for fully paid for health insurance, however she was perenially “sick” or late for work. Both my sales manager and I worked with her to counsel her as she showed promise.  It turned out she had a drug problem that was beyond the scope of non professional counseling. I learned that it isn’t the lack of doctor’s that sends the “uninsured” to the emergency room, it’s a lack of education or acceptance of medicaid by doctors that causes the folks who qualify for medicaid to use the emergency room as their family doctor. In fact her “insurance” through medicaid was superior to what we offered and which cost my business hundreds of dollars per employee. Her use of the emergency room as her family doctor cost we the taxpayers thousands of dollars per visit. During her employement she went to the emergency room at least three times. In the end we fired her as her irresponsibility and continued absenses was bringing down the entire group.

It’s unfortunate that his administration is focusing on bringing up the bottom rather than trying to hang on to the top. Perhaps it translates into more votes and I guess it’s a traditional democratic stance.  

What should New York do to stop the brain drain?