Just two years ago, Yahoo spent $79 million to rebuff a hostile takeover from Microsoft and preserve its independence. Now, a big part of Yahoo’s future prosperity depends on how well it can join arms with Microsoft on a high-risk, high-reward technical project.

Yahoo and Microsoft are racing to meet a fall deadline for launching their joint venture to collaborate on Internet search, an effort by the former rivals to try to narrow the gap with their much stronger, common foe: Google.

The effort — including the retraining of hundreds of Yahoo salespeople to sell ads for both companies, and a conga line of about 400 engineers who are relocating from Yahoo to Microsoft offices in Silicon Valley; Bangalore, India; Burbank; and Redmond, Wash. — needs to be complete by mid-October if the two companies hope to have the show up and running before the start of the holiday season, the critical make-or-break period for advertisers and publishers.

At stake in the joint venture, Yahoo executives say, is the company’s ability to become an innovative force in search again — something Yahoo acknowledges it can no longer afford without its partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The 10-year partnership has Bing providing the underlying results of Yahoo searches, with Yahoo retaining control of how those results are displayed.

But outside observers say more than just Yahoo’s reputation in search is at stake. Considering the revenue and traffic represented by Yahoo’s 3.1 billion U.S. monthly search queries, the search partnership represents a critical gamble by new CEO Carol Bartz to grab a bigger piece of the search revenue pie. During the first half of 2010 compared with last year, Yahoo’s search ad revenue declined by 11 percent, or $84 million, to $674 million, even as the economy improved. Both Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer have made the search transition a top priority for both companies, executives say.”Really, there is a tremendous amount at stake here for both players,” said Laxmi Poruri, an analyst with Primary Global Research. “There are search engine advertisers out there who are eager for this. They want to spend more money on Yahoo and Bing. The problem is these guys (individually) aren’t getting enough traffic for them.”

If the companies miss the mid-October deadline, they say they will be forced to delay the switch in the United States and Canada until 2011, sacrificing the lucrative holiday advertising season. But Poruri said Yahoo also is under pressure in the long run to continue to generate search traffic for Bing. “If the technology is a disappointment or the traffic acquisition is a disappointment, then Microsoft will go somewhere else to get that traffic,” Poruri said.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo executives say the switch-over is going as well as could be expected, and Yahoo says that all of its search traffic, apart from paid search, could be powered by Bing as soon as the end of August. Still, Mark Morrissey, the Yahoo senior vice president in charge of the company’s transition team, said engineers are sometimes pulling 48- to 72-hour stints to hit key milestones.

“I can tell you, far and away, this is the most complex logistical and technical thing I have ever been a part of,” said Morrissey, who also handled Yahoo’s switch to new systems for its paid search ads and display ads.

“All our day jobs are really that at this point,” said Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division.

The Yahoo-Microsoft alliance represents an unprecedented effort by two former competitors to join forces, but it has become increasingly necessary because of Google’s dominance. Google now provides about two-thirds of U.S. Internet searches, and an even higher share in many other countries.

Under the collaboration, Yahoo receives 88 percent of the revenue from searches done on Yahoo sites in the first five years, while saving the heavy costs of the computer infrastructure needed to crawl, index and rank the Internet. Microsoft receives the still-significant search traffic flowing through Yahoo. That is valuable because the more queries a search engine processes, the more relevant its answers, and the more extensive variety of keywords it can sell to advertisers.

Microsoft’s costs for Bing have been huge. Its online services division, which includes Bing and MSN, reported a $2.36 billion loss in fiscal 2010. Meanwhile, Bing gained 4.7 percentage points in market share in its first year, to 12.7 percent of U.S. searches, according to comScore.

Yahoo says its long-term ability to build innovative search products hinges on the collaboration.

“It’s not about the transition,” Morrissey said. “It’s about the future of search, and where we want to go.”

With Yahoo’s share of U.S. searches dipping below 20 percent in recent years, few see Yahoo as a search leader anymore. But Shashi Seth, Yahoo’s new chief of search, says that is about to change. Seth says the collaboration with Microsoft will give Yahoo the resources to develop new kinds of search products that could mimic the serendipity of browsing a newspaper, a sense of surprise and discovery rarely found in the blue hyperlinks of a conventional search query.

One example, Seth says, are Yahoo’s plans to begin offering the “Trending Now” box on its home page to other websites, probably in the next two or three months. Yahoo updates the Trending Now box every few hours based on an analysis of its search traffic, but the featured topics are tailored to users based on geographic location and Web history, so different users see different trending topics.

“The goal is to get users to discover things that they never would have thought about,” said Seth, a former Google executive who arrived at Yahoo in February. “It’s a completely new kind of search experience, one where the user didn’t ask for anything.”

Others are also racing to offer new ways for people to search. Facebook and Ask.com recently introduced new “social search” features that allow users to ask questions of actual people, rather than just query a computer algorithm.

“We think as the social web continues to explode, this is only going to get bigger and bigger,” said Scott Garell, president of Oakland-based Ask Networks.

Some at Yahoo have been frustrated with the more centralized and hierarchical management structure at Microsoft. But despite their history as hostile competitors — Yahoo disclosed that it spent $79 million in 2008 on lawyers and “outside advisers” to respond to Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid — executives say the main challenge is the technical difficulty of the project.

“We’re mutually codependent,” Morrissey said, “on each other’s success.”

Source: Mercury News

Why would you want to get more Twitter followers? What purpose does it serve? And what steps should you take to increase your Twitter followers? These are questions often asked by normal users, brands and business owners who not only see Twitter as a means of social interaction but an effective marketing platform.

You’re interested in increasing your Twitter followers. You want more people reading your updates. It’s not difficult to build a prominent profile but I think it’s important to start with the right understanding. This is the first thing you need to know: It’s not really about how you tweet, what you say or who you talk to but who you are.

There have been several articles on the topic of growing your Twitter presence: many of them focus on teaching you how to use Twitter by providing value in order to increase your Twitter following. While good points were made, I want to offer my perspective on this topic.

Take a look at this list of Twitter users with the most followers and you’ll see that almost everyone on it is famous or well known for reasons other than Twitter. For example, you’ll notice that the top 10 users are mainly all people who own popular websites/businesses and brands or have established a reputation through their involvement in different activities.

Run your eyes down the list further and you’ll notice the same thing: these Twitter users built their large audience through their already established popularity. They didn’t start from the ground up: it’s likely that they started with a decent amount of followers and will continue accumulate them passively through the strength of their reputation or personal brand.

Many people have built their following because they are well known away from Twitter, not because they were inherently entertaining or helpful as a Twitter user. In other words, they grew large follower base because they cleverly integrated their brand or what it is they do, with their Twitter profile. They used their websites or platforms to promote their Twitter profile

This doesn’t mean that you can’t develop a strong Twitter following if you are not famous for something online or offline. It can be done but in my opinion, building a Twitter following has little to do with how you use Twitter. I don’t believe that in order to get a sizeable audience, you need obsesses about specific tweeting etiquette.

I’ve never written any articles on how to use Twitter because I don’t think there’s an ‘optimal’ or best way to use Twitter, nor am I interested in regulating another person’s lifestream. Even if you’re purely using Twitter as a broadcast tool to increase your online influence, how or what you tweet is not really the thing you should be focusing on.

So let’s talk about what I think will help you to get more Twitter followers.

Maximize Visibility: Treat Your Twitter Profile Like Any Other Website

Image Credit: Tweet via QuickSilver

The first step is to understand that your Twitter profile is like any other website. You should treat it no differently from your own blog or a free opt-in newsletter. This means that if you want to increase your Twitter subscriber base, you just need to do one thing again and again: Drive web traffic to your profile. The more targeted the traffic, the better.

This sounds obvious but many people overlook this fundamental principle and focus instead on less relevant details like Twitter usage times/frequency. I’m sure that causing controversy or learning to tweet a certain way might get some extra exposure to your profile but in my opinion, the benefits are minimal. How, when and what you tweet is not crucial.

When you want to catch as many fish as possible, use a large net and spread it as far as you can. The guideline to remember when building your profile is just one: keep working on sending visitors to your profile. People can only follow you when they know you exist.

With this in mind, you can play around with a myriad number of marketing strategies, just like how you would promote a website. Think in terms of incentives. Why would someone want to follow me on Twitter? How will he or she benefit from it? Assuming that someone doesn’t know who I am, what would motivate him or her to subscribe to my Twitter profile?

Here are just some examples of traffic-driving strategies (there are many more):

1. Create a tool/application and promote your profile alongside it.
2. Buy a banner ad to target tech-savvy audiences, link it to your profile.
3. Use Twitter as a tool for tech/customer support.
4. Organize a contest through your Twitter profile
5. Include links to your profile in email/forum signatures.
6. Evangelize Twitter on your blog/other blogs and include a link to your profile.
7. Connect your blog and other social media profiles to your Twitter page.
8. Learn to pitch Twitter influencers with articles relevant to their interest
9. Explicitly ask another user to recommend your profile or exchange recommendations.

Apart from these strategies, there’s also another sure-fire way to increase your Twitter followers and this simply involves the act of following other users. Lets look at this in detail.

Mass Following Twitter Users: The Favorite Methodology of ‘Spammers’

Twitter is similar to many other social networks in numerous aspects, particularly when it comes to friending behaviors. Like Myspace, its possible to befriend a massive amount of users, some of whom will add you back as a friend. Continually adding Twitter users as friends allows you to increase the amount of followers you have.

This is a strategy that has worked remarkably well for early adopters when the Twitter was still a relatively new phenomenon. For example, I know a marketer who followed over ten thousand users and got thousands of followers in return. He then cut down the amount of people he followed and changed his username to make the account look legitimate.

Nowadays, the Twitter community has grown more aware of these ’spammers’ and many tools like the Twitter Blacklist and Twerpscan have been developed to help Twitter users weed out people who try to follow many users in order to build an large audience. Still, a portion of Twitter users (perhaps the new ones) tend to add anyone who befriends them.

Take for instance, Osen Komura. A fake profile set up by another Twitter user in February 2008 as a social experiment. The Osen account followed 41,798 Twitter users in one month and 7,847 users added him as a friend, a 17%+ follow-back rate.

And Osen is not only the only profile out there with thousands of followers all derived through mass user following. The question is: Should you consider using the same strategy?

Apart from the risk of being labeled a Twitter spammer and increasing the noise on your Twitter stream, this method still works. However, know that following so many users inevitably reduces your ability to keep track of individual users since they are drowned out by other updates, unless you conscientiously keep track of your Twitter stream or use RSS. But keep in mind that this is not essential. Here are some good reasons why you really don’t need to mass follow twitter users.

Scoble has suggested that it’s beneficial to follow many Twitter users because you get more access to information and it shows that you’re listening and more open to communication or meeting people. Perhaps so, but I would recommend increasing the people you follow on Twitter gradually, while making sure that you’re maintaining conversational interactiveness.

Most Twitter users don’t like it if you’re simply following him/her to broadcast a message and if you don’t monitor them equally in return or engage them in conversation. Unless you’re a popular celebrity of some sort, one-way attention doesn’t work very well for Twitter.

In any case, only viewing Twitter as a broadcast platform to drive traffic to your websites is a limited perspective, especially when your Twitter followers offer a wealth of knowledge, connections and opinions you can use to improve your business and personal skills.

Personally, I prefer building up an online reputation and driving traffic to my Twitter profile. For me, the benefits of Twitter come from using it as a conversational/networking tool, so I’m more concerned with whose updates I’m receiving daily and hence, the people I follow.

All in all, it depends on your goals and how you use Twitter. Feel free to share this article with your Twitter friends. I’ll love to get more feedback on this topic.

And yes…please follow me on Twitter and say hi! I’m always looking to follow new people so don’t hesitate to introduce yourself. I’m pretty friendly and open to new experiences.

SOURCE: http://www.doshdosh.com/how-to-get-more-twitter-followers/