Y! Mobile Blog
Yahoo! Mobile

If you’ve ever wondered, “What can I get for my phone from Yahoo?,” or “Is there a Yahoo! News app?,” you can get answers to these questions—as well as access to all Yahoo! mobile services—at mobile.yahoo.com You’ll find information on the many Yahoo! services and apps available for your phone, including Yahoo! Mail and Messenger, Finance, Sports, Flickr, and your other Yahoo! favorites. The mobile site makes it easy to get Yahoo! on your phone–just type in your number, and we’ll send you a text link that gives you the best product experience available for your phone.

Poke around on the Yahoo! Mobile site; we have something for everyone.

P.S. Our Yahoo! Mobile Site now also links to your blog!

Ginny Hung
Yahoo! Mobile

Yesterday we released a new feature on Social Pulse , allowing you to view and make comments on your friends’ Facebook®, Flickr®, and MySpace® updates and photo uploads — all from your phone.

For those of you who haven’t checked out the Social Pulse feature before, it’s our mobile one-stop shop for all of your favorite social networks. You get real-time updates from Facebook, Twitter®, Flickr, MySpace, Friendster®, Last.fm®, Bebo®, Dopplr™, and Yahoo! Buzz™. So even if you aren’t at the computer, you can still find out what your friends are up to.

You can also post your status from here, too. There’s no need to go to each individual network, because Social Pulse lets you update once and publish to one or all sites.

Check it out here, or by going to “Social Pulse” in the “My Favorites” tab from the Yahoo! Mobile homepage at m.yahoo.com.

Lee Parry
Yahoo! Mobile product manager

Last Tuesday, in “Demystifying Mobile,” Paul Cushman our director of mobile sales strategy, told us why conducting tests and defining benchmarks is necessary in optimizing your mobile strategy.

In today’s final post, he explains the importance of performance measurement.  Whether you decide to build an iPhone app or a mobile Web experience, first find out the general behaviors of your users, and then decide on your strategy. You should also consider the different types of phones and carriers that are typically used by your customer.

Paul’s word of advice: Just think of mobile as the Internet. We are already familiar with it. By applying the Internet’s basic rules to mobile, we don’t have to panic.

Read his full post in our Yahoo! Advertising Blog.

Ginny Hung
Yahoo! Mobile

You are watching the Olympics with a few friends, and they are raving about Evan Lysacek, but you have no idea who he is. This morning, you ran out the door right before the women’s alpine skiing event, and now you are wondering who won the gold medal. Where can you find an answer when you don’t have a computer lying around? Aside from using our Yahoo! Winter Olympics mobile site (http://m.yahoo.com/Olympics), you can also do a quick Yahoo! search from your phone to find all the latest Olympics-related information.

We’ve covered everything you could search for, from the most general “Olympics” search term to more specific information, like participating countries, athletes, and even particular sports. We’ll give you medal counts, upcoming events, the latest news, images, and more.

To give you a sneak peak of what everyone’s been searching for, speedskater Apolo Ohno had a meteoric rise in Search: about 2,000% more searches than in previous weeks. Shaun White also spiked heavily, with 283% more searches on Mobile. But it was Lindsey Vonn who already had people’s attention: Searches wentup 71% during the Olympics opening weekend, and she was generally twice as popular as her fellow spiking U.S. athletes.

Mobile users also wanted to know where they could get those Canadian mittens, as well as hats, beanies, jackets, and Team USA apparel.

You can try Yahoo! Search on mobile by doing a search from m.yahoo.com on your phone’s browser or by  using our emulator. And of course you can also use the Yahoo! Search on the PC to help you follow the Olympics.

Olivier Gillin

Yahoo! mobile search product manager

Last week, in the first of a three-part series called “Demystifying Mobile,” our director of mobile sales strategy, Paul Cushman, talked about the four things that marketers should consider before jumping into the mobile advertising channel.

In this week’s post, he discusses the importance of running bucket tests and defining benchmarks to maintain effective mobile campaigns. The user information found will be very insightful and will help you tweak and optimize your strategy accordingly. You can read a small excerpt below, but be sure to read his full article in our Yahoo! Advertising Blog.

Try thinking of mobile today as the 1996 Web all over again. What were we doing then? We had a simple test matrix that mapped offers and placement. You “ran broad” at the start, evaluated performance using the rudimentary analytics solutions of the day, and then you optimized—and learned very quickly what worked and what didn’t.

Check back in with us next week as Paul will be talking about why tracking and measuring performance is important in mobile.

Ginny Hung

Yahoo! Mobile

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games are finally here! Over at Yahoo!, we have a big reason to be excited about this galvanizing event for people around the world. In addition to keeping fans on top of the action with a Games-dedicated website, today we’re launching a new Olympic mobile site at m.yahoo.com/olympics.

It’s the place to go when you’re out and about and want up-to-the-minute coverage on this year’s Games. You’ll get access to everything from live results, upcoming events, medal counts, and photos to news, expert commentary, and more—all from your phone. We’ve also integrated Olympics into our mobile search results, so you can easily find what you need fast.

If you’re a fan of Lindsey Vonn, you can do a quick search and we’ll show you her athlete profile, which includes how many medals she’s won, her most recent headlines, her latest results, and even her birthday. (It’s October 18, 1984, by the way.)

The new Olympic mobile site is available in English for 13 different countries, including the U.S., Canada, the Philippines, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

We hope you’ll check out our Winter Olympics mobile experience. You can get a preview in the video below. Be sure to give us some feedback in the comments section below!

Carl Teeple
North America product lead, mobile media products

Paul Cushman, our director of mobile sales strategy, gives us the skinny on mobile advertising in the first of a three-part series on demystifying mobile for advertisers.

As he explains, mobile is not a strategy on its own, but rather a channel in part of the overall marketing strategy. Mobile advertising abides by the same rules and patterns as traditional and Internet marketing.

In today’s post, he explores four aspects that marketers should consider when thinking about how to advertise on mobile. Read it here at our Yahoo! Advertising Blog, and stay tuned next week for more.

Ginny Hung
Yahoo! Mobile

Mobile Marketing Campaign Generates More than $6 for Every $1 Spent

For the last several years, the mobile industry talked about the opportunity for mobile advertising and the medium’s ability to help brands engage their target demographic with the right message, in the right place at the right time.  Now, brands from all major categories are thinking of mobile as an integral part of their overall advertising campaigns and turning to us to navigate the mobile adverting marketplace.

In the second half of last year, La Quinta Inns & Suites partnered with us to include mobile banner ads as part of their summer broadcast campaign. The goal was to drive increased traffic to both La Quinta’s mobile and PC Web sites, generate bookings and raise call volume to dedicated 800 numbers.

Driving bookings through various calls of action on mobile

Banner ads across Yahoo!’s mobile homepage, Weather and Driving Directions properties generated several million impressions. However, impressions are never enough.

As with any campaign, delivering meaningful ROI is a key metric.  In order to effectively track the mobile ROI, La Quinta partnered with Polaris Research to quantify the impact of the campaign and found it generated more than $6.00 for every dollar spent on the campaign.

Additionally, the research revealed that Yahoo! mobile banners and offline advertising generated significant synergies, suggesting that the mobile medium should be closely coordinated with offline media including TV, Radio, Print, and Magazines.

ROI across all media and tactics

Mobile advertising is expected to grow rapidly over the next few years and many more brands will integrate mobile into their overall marketing mix.

Best,

David Katz
Vice President, Yahoo! Mobile North America

In recognition of Safer Internet Day, people and organizations around the world are taking a moment to discuss the importance of safe and responsible ways to interact and engage with  the Web.

This year, the focus is on “Think B4 U post,” with the goal to help kids handle their digital reputation (e.g. how people are viewed based on what they post and share online). Because photos and videos can be shared and widely distributed within minutes, there can be serious consequences.

With many people, particularly teens, using their phones as the primary way of staying in touch with friends and family, and to surf the Web, check out Yahoo!’s top five mobile safety tips and learn more about Safer Internet Day in our Yodel Post.

Ginny Hung
Yahoo! Mobile

Welcome to the new Yahoo! Mobile Blog.

We plan to make this site a resource for those of you interested in staying on top of what’s new with our products, consumer experiences, and the mobile business in general. You can expect to learn about new product launches and enhancements, quick tips and tricks, our take on market trends, and predictions for where we see the market is heading.

Yahoo! is a leader in the mobile industry. We’ve developed best-in-class services, such as Search, Mail, and Messenger across thousands of mobile devices, and launched apps on multiple platforms for various phones, including  iPhone and BlackBerry. We reach millions of people daily, and our Mobile Homepage is available in more than 30 countries.

By designing simple, open, and feature-rich services that harness the unique attributes of mobile devices, we focus on providing better mobile experiences that are engaging and personally relevant to users like you, enabling you to connect to your world at anytime, anywhere.

So what’s to come in 2010? Three developments will play a key role in shaping the mobile industry: Powerful browsers, the OS as a launching pad, and local content.

Powerful browsers: With the growth of smartphones and the convergence around robust HTML browsers, we see a great opportunity to make significant strides in the on-device experience. Our recent launch of the Y! Mobile Homepage points the way.

The OS as a launching pad for services: The OS is becoming the new homepage. This has huge implications for device manufacturers and carriers who have for years programmed the experience with presets.  For us, it means we must think about how to remain a destination of choice, where users come to find out what’s happening in their world.

Local content:  We think the convergence of local content, merchants, and its offerings is particularly interesting, and we expect significant innovations in this area. We also see breakthrough product experiences around location-based services that build awareness of news, events, and activities that are happening around you locally.

There’s much more to come, so stay tuned for more. Be sure to check back here frequently for updates!

We look forward to engaging conversations and your feedback.

Cheers,

Irv Henderson

VP, Global Mobile Products