Here’s a slightly OT post dedicated to one Ryan Soriano or djwoblely, originally from Alaska, USA and currently a DLSU MBA graduate student. The short summary is this: he is in possession of my stolen MacBook Pro and was selling the same in clear violation of the Philippine Anti-fencing law.

The story actually starts October of 2008, when our home was broken into by unidentified suspects. The MacBook Pro was one of the items stolen. Last March 17, friends pointed out a Sulit.com.ph ad (inactive now) posted by one djwoblely that was selling a MacBook Pro with the same serial number as my stolen laptop. I checked out the local Macintosh Users Group forum and saw that the same person had posted a similar ad on Philmug.ph. I immediately tried contacting the seller and the Mandaluyong PNP to arrange an entrapment operation but decided against it at the last minute (the 14 green years in me told me to take a more compassionate approach). Good for Ryan Soriano, bad for me, as I would soon find out.

I talked with Ryan Soriano twice. Our conversations (1 and 2) plus the messages he left on the Philmug thread and through PM all indicated that he was going to return the stolen MacBook Pro to me. But as luck would have it, this Ryan Soriano had other plans for the MBP. I agreed to give him a week to downgrade and get his files. Mr. Soriano probably used the 1 week to get his girlfriend’s mom, Atty. Epifania “Fanny” G. Obias to help him come up with a plan to keep the laptop. Ryan Soriano later PMs me that mommy dearest is now the custodian of the stolen laptop. Touching no?

Fast forward to today. After countless attempts to get Ryan Soriano and Atty. Epifania Obias to return the stolen laptop failed, I’ve decided to get help from the cops, the media, and the Philippine online community in general. If there’s one thing that should stick, it’s the fact that Ryan Soriano and Atty. Epifania Obias are in possession of my stolen MacBook Pro and have chosen to ignore all attempts to peacefully surrender this stolen item to me, despite providing all legal documents to prove that I’m the laptop’s rightful owner.

Me and a handful of Philmuggers believe that Internet vigilantism can ultimately force Ryan Soriano and Atty. Epifania Obias to return the stolen MacBook Pro. If you want to help out, blog about the case. The more people talking about the specifics of the case in public, the more painful it becomes for Ryan Soriano and Atty. Epifania Obias to hold on to the stolen item.

Read the epic Philmug thread detailing the case of Ryan Soriano and the stolen MacBook Pro, all 560 posts (and counting). It makes for one interesting Holy Week read.

Thanks for your support:

• Stolen Macbook Pro Being Sold on PhilMUG!
• Ryan Soriano Does Not Return Stolen Macbook Pro, Betrays Trust
• Story Of A Stolen Mac Book Pro
• Stolen Laptops, Car Robberies in Ortigas Center, The Fort

Check out the keyword rich text link underneath the Verisign logo.

This is very reminiscent of the free web counter / powered by keyword link building variety a few years back, which has since been caught and “controlled” by Google.

Does it still work? Verisign does rank for “ssl certificates” (#3 here) for the destination URL pointed to by the widget. The next question is, if a big company like Verisign can get away with this, why can’t others?

You start conversations with your new buzz ambassadors and realize that they’re not really the best that blogger 1 was into stamp collecting, while blogger 2 was into celebrity news. You walk away resigned to the fact that your 5 minutes of blog fame would never have the WOMM ROI you were hoping for.

Your recourse? You hook up with a social media expert or SME (not to be confused with snake oil salesmen). SMEs come in different forms and sizes. But one common denominator is their propensity to equate expertise with any of the following:

1. Total blog feed subscriber count
2. Daily blog traffic stats
3. PageRank
4. Digg, Facebook, Friendster, Plurk, Twitter, LinkedIn friend/follower count.
5. Total member count of social media app built, bought or maintained by the SME
6. Invitations to social media-focused offline events

It’s hard not to consider these as our SME might have spent countless hours/days building up his or her SM profile. Setting up accounts, profile pics, avatars, blog themes, widgets, etc. can be time consuming and if it has a purpose it’s this: it proves that 1) he/she could give a smart auto signup/maintain bot a good run for its money and 1) your SME has too much free time on his/her hands (emphasis on free, as in not work-related).

Most social media experts miss the target, badly.

Expertise should never be defined by just the simple artifacts mentioned above. An expert should know the medium inside out but greater emphasis should be given to strategy and creative execution. He/she should know how to identify the right seeders and the right incentive that appeals to these seeders. Our expert should know that humor still sells best. He/she would be able to design creatives the can incorporate humor but still convey a marketing message. Lastly, our expert should be an offline networking force since in the Philippines, offline drives online.

So how do you cut through the bullshit that is Philippine Social Media? Who among our self-proclaimed social media experts really hold up to the test?

Thank you Michael for the inspiration.

It’s scary how generic this manifesto can be. Do a replace-all and substitute Yahoo! with your favorite company and the lessons would still apply. Companies that saw growth spurts and then over expanded to capture perceived opportunities should make the manifesto a must read.

Here’s the full transcript:

Three and half years ago, I enthusiastically joined Yahoo! The magnitude of the opportunity was only matched by the magnitude of the assets. And an amazing team has been responsible for rebuilding Yahoo!

It has been a profound experience. I am fortunate to have been a part of dramatic change for the Company. And our successes speak for themselves. More users than ever, more engaging than ever and more profitable than ever!

I proudly bleed purple and yellow everyday! And like so many people here, I love this company

But all is not well. Last Thursday’s NY Times article was a blessing in the disguise of a painful public flogging. While it lacked accurate details, its conclusions rang true, and thus was a much needed wake up call. But also a call to action. A clear statement with which I, and far too many Yahoo’s, agreed. And thankfully a reminder. A reminder that the measure of any person is not in how many times he or she falls down - but rather the spirit and resolve used to get back up. The same is now true of our Company.

It’s time for us to get back up.

I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action. We have the opportunity - in fact the invitation - to send a strong, clear and powerful message to our shareholders and Wall Street, to our advertisers and our partners, to our employees (both current and future), and to our users. They are all begging for a signal that we recognize and understand our problems, and that we are charting a course for fundamental change. Our current course and speed simply will not get us there. Short-term band-aids will not get us there.

It’s time for us to get back up and seize this invitation.

I imagine there’s much discussion amongst the Company’s senior most leadership around the challenges we face. At the risk of being redundant, I wanted to share my take on our current situation and offer a recommended path forward, an attempt to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Recognizing Our Problems

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything — to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like — rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.

We lack clarity of ownership and accountability. The most painful manifestation of this is the massive redundancy that exists throughout the organization. We now operate in an organizational structure — admittedly created with the best of intentions — that has become overly bureaucratic. For far too many employees, there is another person with dramatically similar and overlapping responsibilities. This slows us down and burdens the company with unnecessary costs.

Equally problematic, at what point in the organization does someone really OWN the success of their product or service or feature? Product, marketing, engineering, corporate strategy, financial operations… there are so many people in charge (or believe that they are in charge) that it’s not clear if anyone is in charge. This forces decisions to be pushed up - rather than down. It forces decisions by committee or consensus and discourages the innovators from breaking the mold… thinking outside the box.

There’s a reason why a centerfielder and a left fielder have clear areas of ownership. Pursuing the same ball repeatedly results in either collisions or dropped balls. Knowing that someone else is pursuing the ball and hoping to avoid that collision - we have become timid in our pursuit. Again, the ball drops.

We lack decisiveness. Combine a lack of focus with unclear ownership, and the result is that decisions are either not made or are made when it is already too late. Without a clear and focused vision, and without complete clarity of ownership, we lack a macro perspective to guide our decisions and visibility into who should make those decisions. We are repeatedly stymied by challenging and hairy decisions. We are held hostage by our analysis paralysis.

We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company.

• YME vs. Musicmatch
• Flickr vs. Photos
• YMG video vs. Search video
• Deli.cio.us vs. myweb
• Messenger and plug-ins vs. Sidebar and widgets
• Social media vs. 360 and Groups
• Front page vs. YMG
• Global strategy from BU’vs. Global strategy from Int’l

We have lost our passion to win. Far too many employees are “phoning” it in, lacking the passion and commitment to be a part of the solution. We sit idly by while — at all levels — employees are enabled to “hang around”. Where is the accountability? Moreover, our compensation systems don’t align to our overall success. Weak performers that have been around for years are rewarded. And many of our top performers aren’t adequately recognized for their efforts.

As a result, the employees that we really need to stay (leaders, risk-takers, innovators, passionate) become discouraged and leave. Unfortunately many who opt to stay are not the ones who will lead us through the dramatic change that is needed.

Solving our Problems

We have awesome assets. Nearly every media and communications company is painfully jealous of our position. We have the largest audience, they are highly engaged and our brand is synonymous with the Internet.

If we get back up, embrace dramatic change, we will win.

I don’t pretend there is only one path forward available to us. However, at a minimum, I want to be part of the solution and thus have outlined a plan here that I believe can work. It is my strong belief that we need to act very quickly or risk going further down a slippery slope, The plan here is not perfect; it is, however, FAR better than no action at all.

There are three pillars to my plan:

1. Focus the vision.

2. Restore accountability and clarity of ownership.

3. Execute a radical reorganization.

1. Focus the vision

a) We need to boldly and definitively declare what we are and what we are not.

b) We need to exit (sell?) non core businesses and eliminate duplicative projects and businesses.

My belief is that the smoothly spread peanut butter needs to turn into a deliberately sculpted strategy — that is narrowly focused.

We can’t simply ask each BU to figure out what they should stop doing. The result will continue to be a non-cohesive strategy. The direction needs to come decisively from the top. We need to place our bets and not second guess. If we believe Media will maximize our ROI — then let’s not be bashful about reducing our investment in other areas. We need to make the tough decisions, articulate them and stick with them — acknowledging that some people (users / partners / employees) will not like it. Change is hard.

2. Restore accountability and clarity of ownership

a) Existing business owners must be held accountable for where we find ourselves today — heads must roll,

b) We must thoughtfully create senior roles that have holistic accountability for a particular line of business (a variant of a GM structure that will work with Yahoo!’s new focus)

c) We must redesign our performance and incentive systems.

I believe there are too many BU leaders who have gotten away with unacceptable results and worse — unacceptable leadership. Too often they (we!) are the worst offenders of the problems outlined here. We must signal to both the employees and to our shareholders that we will hold these leaders (ourselves) accountable and implement change.

By building around a strong and unequivocal GM structure, we will not only empower those leaders, we will eliminate significant overhead throughout our multi-headed matrix. It must be very clear to everyone in the organization who is empowered to make a decision and ownership must be transparent. With that empowerment comes increased accountability — leaders make decisions, the rest of the company supports those decisions, and the leaders ultimately live/die by the results of those decisions.

My view is that far too often our compensation and rewards are just spreading more peanut butter. We need to be much more aggressive about performance based compensation. This will only help accelerate our ability to weed out our lowest performers and better reward our hungry, motivated and productive employees.

3. Execute a radical reorganization

a) The current business unit structure must go away.

b) We must dramatically decentralize and eliminate as much of the matrix as possible.

c) We must reduce our headcount by 15-20%.

I emphatically believe we simply must eliminate the redundancies we have created and the first step in doing this is by restructuring our organization. We can be more efficient with fewer people and we can get more done, more quickly. We need to return more decision making to a new set of business units and their leadership. But we can’t achieve this with baby step changes, We need to fundamentally rethink how we organize to win.

Independent of specific proposals of what this reorganization should look like, two key principles must be represented:

Blow up the matrix. Empower a new generation and model of General Managers to be true general managers. Product, marketing, user experience & design, engineering, business development & operations all report into a small number of focused General Managers. Leave no doubt as to where accountability lies.

Kill the redundancies. Align a set of new BU’s so that they are not competing against each other. Search focuses on search. Social media aligns with community and communications. No competing owners for Video, Photos, etc. And Front Page becomes Switzerland. This will be a delicate exercise — decentralization can create inefficiencies, but I believe we can find the right balance.

I love Yahoo! I’m proud to admit that I bleed purple and yellow. I’m proud to admit that I shaved a Y in the back of my head.

My motivation for this memo is the adamant belief that, as before, we have a tremendous opportunity ahead. I don’t pretend that I have the only available answers, but we need to get the discussion going; change is needed and it is needed soon. We can be a stronger and faster company - a company with a clearer vision and clearer ownership and clearer accountability.

We may have fallen down, but the race is a marathon and not a sprint. I don’t pretend that this will be easy. It will take courage, conviction, insight and tremendous commitment. I very much look forward to the challenge.

So let’s get back up.

Catch the balls.

And stop eating peanut butter.

Initial launch planned for USA, Canada, UK, Germany, France, India, Indonesia and Philippines. Other countries will be supported on an ongoing basis.

Go to the Yahoo! Mobile page from your phone’s browser to sign up to be a beta tester.

Speaking of reshuffling, if you work for Yahoo! and you feel you need a change of scenery, this Yahoo resignation letter generator might come in handy!

Also you have to admire Carol Bartz’s optimism. Here’s hoping she succeeds!

“These declines have strong implications for the upcoming holiday season as well as offline sales,” said Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise. “Everyone is aware of the role that the Internet plays to influence offline sales through research, so this slowdown may indicate a further ripple effect in sales in retail locations.”

Definitely not good for retailers’ Q4 aspirations. As demand shrinks, retailers will have to outspend each other on customer acquisition, which will cut into their margins, which will ultimately cause the biggest Christmas Party budget cuts for the people they rely on for outsourced help (me). Great.

Here’s the full report.

SEO’s are costs that do not, for the moment, give any form of worthy results. Our experience in e-commerce with myAyala for the past 8 years has indicated that the cost of SEO is better spent on an offline campaign. i.e. print add or TVC about the website or an offline promotion requiring an online fullfilment.

The best way to get good search engine results is to simply build consistent and loyal “visits” to your site. In the Philippine context, an offline campaign is necessary.

I really think that person may have been referring to paid search rather than organic but the last paragraph make it sound like he is really hating on organic.

Strong words from a company whose flagship category homepage (flowers) metadata looks something like this:

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”flower delivery philippine, flower delivery philippines, flowers to philippines, flowers to the philippines, philippines flower shop, philippines flower shops, send flowers philippines, send flowers to the philippines”>
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Online Philippine flower shop that allows you to send flowers to the Philippines. We deliver to anywhere in the Philippines.”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>
<META NAME=”Revisit-After” CONTENT=”7 Days”>
<title>Philippines flower shop online |  Send flowers to Philippines</title>

Ano ba talaga kuya?

According to a June McKinsey & Co. survey of 340 senior marketing executives worldwide, 91% are using online advertising, and over one-half indicate that their companies plan to maintain or exceed current levels where possible. Even more telling, 55% of marketers said they’re cutting expenditures on traditional media, precisely in order to increase funding for online efforts.

With search adoption increasing, more and more marketers should look at shoring up the budgets for the channels that provide the best ROI, while drastically reducing cost for the ones that ummmmmm give you good branding returns.