Back to February 1st, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion ($31 per share) to acquire all Yahoo’s outstanding shares, and Yahoo rejected it. Since then Yahoo’s share price has dropped to $9 per share over 9 months time, and Jerry Yang, Yahoo ex-CEO had to step down when facing intense pressure from shareholders. Later on, in November, Microsoft made a proposal to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion.

Today, Microsoft is hiring former Yahoo VP engineering Qi Lu as President of Microsoft online services group. Lu was at Yahoo for 10 years, most recently served as executive vice president of engineering for all of Yahoo’s search and advertising development efforts. Before Yahoo, Lu was at the IBM Almaden Research Center.

There is no doubt that Microsoft needs Yahoo to rescue their online services arm as they are slipping behind Google in the online advertising market, which is worth $25 billion and growing. Google has a market share of 78.2% compared with Yahoo’s 17% and Microsoft’s 6%. Microsoft is desperate to change the current situation, and after unsuccessful attempt to acquire Yahoo, Microsoft is now trying to get Yahoo’s tech stars, who built the Yahoo empire, and they believe that the most valuable assets of software companies are their talented people.

The whole point of marketing is to promote your products via effective advertising channels. In another word, spend less money to get more sales. So, it would be wise to have a better understanding of your customers’ habits and the entire trading environment before developing your marketing plan.

Assumption Is Dangerous

Any marketing action should be based upon research but not assumptions, and the reason is simple: you don’t sell things to yourself. So, why do you care about what you think too much? Your customers may NOT like the stuff you like, and the things that obvious to you may NOT so obvious to your customers.

Continuity Planning

Marketing campaigns normally only boost your sales within a short time period, and your sales volume  falls back when the campaigns end. That is the nature of campaigns. As a business owner, you certainly expect to get more value than the quick sales from the expensive adverts. So, before you start the campaigns, you can ask yourself that how each of them would add value to your brand, including product name, logo, and any other trade marks you own. By doing that, your intangible assets will be worth more money, together with a better industry reputation.

Customer Relationship

You need fans of your products, and they say good things about you all the time. It is not too difficult to turn your customers to evenglists. What you need to do is to keep good relationships with them by providing better service all the time. In fact, the easist way to achieve that is to sit back and review the whole sales process as often as you can. Take the TV sales for example, you can give your customer a ring several hours before the delivery time, and then spend a few minutes to set the TV up for them. You can also ask them to fill in a survey or feedback form for you. Remember, every little helps!

We’ve signed up a Twitter account recently. After playing with it for a while, we found twitter is really cool and useful. To be honest, we didn’t see its beauty and power for the first few days, we thought it was too simple to receive such a lot of applause from the world. I have to remind myself, however, that all great ideas are simple.

Now, we really enjoy using twitter and found some simple ways to get valuable information for our business, and here are some tips.

Read industry’s break news:

Twitter is arguably the best place to find and follow the industry’s news you care. It’s designed in such a way to avoid spam, because you can pick and mix the messages from the news providers you trust.

Keep up with your customers:

I believe you all understand the importance of customers loyalty, which would make them into your evangelists. For that reason, it would be ideal to know what they are talking about in real-time. Twitter, again, makes all these possible!

Help your colleague:

We live in a world where information is overloaded. But, we also need to get things done in an easy and straight forward way. Twitter is quick in the way of post-n-reply, which can be applied in our working environment. Got a question? Post! Got an answer? Reply! Simple as that.

Turn conversations to leads:

Twitter is a platform and a community, where you can find potential customers. If you go to search.twitter.com, and search the products/services related to your business, you can soon find people looking for help and recommendations. Bingo! Now, you can kick off the conversations with your knowledge. Please please remember, you are there to help and to build your reputation. Focus on the long-term relationships but not the direct quick sales.

Understand your competitors better:

Time to turn your attention to your competitors. It is always smart to keep on eye on them, isn’t it? Again, you can either follow them or search their name on search.twitter.com.

Some people hate their competitors and they’d like to do things to damage their competitors’ businesses, while others try to build decent relationships with the competitors by not being too aggressive. Well, it may surprise you if you respect your competitors and say some good things about them sincerely.

Follow Bizroof On Twitter

We just rolled out a new contact us form, which ensures that your messages arrive the most relevant departments via the shortest route.

Due to the high volume of messages, you may have to wait couple of hours to get replied. But, we guarantee to answer every question comes to us.

We respect your feedback and develop the system just for you. By the way, we won’t use your data for any purpose without your permission.

Google now allows us to reorder and annotate search results. If you log into google account, you can see 3 buttons next to each search result, including: Promote, Remove and Comment. But, any changes you made will ONLY be saved into your Google account and won’t affect others, at least for now.

Google obviously understand the beauty and power of human-editing community (e.g. Wikipedia, DMOZ), and they now encourage their massive user base to contribute to the search engine. Although Google haven’t directly linked their search algorithm with this new feature yet, they might do that in the future if they are able to collect solid and substentcial evidence to show human-editing leads to better search quality.

It is difficult to run a business, especially during the economic downturn. People are very careful spending their money by all means. Your suppliers start to chase outstanding invoices and your customers order less than ever.

So, it is really important to review your cash flow on a regular basis to find out your exact CASH situation.  And then, you have to dig deeper to look at “everything” could help you through the troubled economic times. If you are not cash flow positive at the moment, you need to work out a plan to achieve that asap. And one way you can do that is by negotiating prices with all your suppliers, even your broadband provider. Remember, every little helps!

Your cash flow, at the same time, measures your business performance and assesses your options for growth. Why? It is always telling you the truth and never trying to hide anything.

You can now subscribe to your events feed so that other calendars which supports the iCalendar format can stay up-to-date with Bizroof.

The following is a list of applications which support iCalendar: Apple iCal, Mozilla Calendar, Google Calendar, Microsoft Office Outlook, Windows Live Calendar etc.

Microsoft today launched SearchPerks, which gives users points when they use msn live search, and then the points can be redeemed for all sorts of rewards.

The new CashBack programme encourages people to use Live Search,  and they believe it will work in terms of increasing market share of online search.

To participate the SearchPerks, you have to download a special browser add-on, and you must use Internet Explorer. So, Microsoft is trying to kill three birds with one stone:

1. To get more Live Search users
2. To get more IE users
3. To have a better understanding of what people are searching for

We just noticed that another large PageRank and backlinks update taking place in the Google Toolbar. It has been just over 2 months since last PageRank update. We’ve found that many google competitors’ websites PageRank increased quit a lot, including: cuil.com, fireeagle.yahoo.net, delicious.com, maps.live.com and many others.

Google uses PageRank to identify the importance of web pages. Although there are more than a hundred parameters affecting google search results, PageRank is still one of the most critical factors.

Cisco just announced that it acquired an open-source IM protocol, Jabber. Cisco will use this new weapon to fight in the enterprise collaboration market, which is currently dominated by Microsoft Office Communications, AOL AIM, and Google Talk.

Enterprise Instant messaging (IM) plateforms need to be integrated with their business process and existed operation system. In such a way, the communication between people will be improved.