Lots of talk about Microsoft’s $44.6 Billion bid for Yahoo! Most of it focuses on search and online advertising. But I bet we’ll start hearing more about the social computing value of Yahoo! and how its people have been excerising their brains and buying plug and play social media assets for many years now. Flickr, Upcoming and del.icio.us are a few names in teh Yahoo! family of aquisitions. These tools help people interconnect their online activities form photo sharing to bookmarking articles to managing their calendar of fun community activities.
In a Forrester Research blog post by Jeremiah Owyang on this subject, I really liked this pearl of wisdom about the future of media companies:
A new definition of media. My colleague Charlene Li has written before about the transformation media companies are undertaking due to the rise of social computing. As syndication replaces aggregation, a media company becomes one which assembles an audience, not necessarily a firm which creates content (think Facebook v. CNN). In light of this acquisition, I’d add one more dimension to this observation. With Yahoo gone, the two remaining online media powerhouses: Google and Microsoft are both technology companies. These are firms who specialize in creating tools and innovations to facilitate the user experience of the Web and marketer access to customer data. I think this acquisition signals for both marketers and media firms that the trend of Left Brain Marketing – a data-driven approach to marketing – is irrevocably changing who we call a media firm. Tomorrow’s media companies are technology innovators who can connect audiences with marketing messages, not content creators.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this all plays out. Oh, btw That quote was Charlene’s, not mine. She’s so prolific, I’d be happy to take credit for it!