In what Yahoo hopes to be a life-altering deal, the aging internet company acquired social media site Tumblr for $1.1 billion, affectively gaining the attention of millions of users that visit Tumblr monthly (that is, if they all don't jump ship first).

Purchase rumors began to swirl last week after the company's CFO Ken Goldman spoke of Yahoo's "aging demographic" and their need to be "cool" again. With the acquisition now official, Yahoo will suddenly be knee deep in the content-consuming, uber-engaged millennials that it craves, but the question is whether Tumblr's core users will stick around for fear that Yahoo will alter the blogging site—or whether advertisers and brands can handle the rough-and-tumble world of Tumblr.

However, CEO Marissa Mayer was quick to assure users (with her first Tumblr post, of course) that Yahoo would "not screw it up" and had no plans to tamper with the site or its crew. Mayer's post, in the copyright-flouting spirit of Tumblr, used an image that without first getting its creator's permission.

Founder David Karp—who is slated to become Forbes' youngest billionaire—will remain at the head of the company along with his team. According to Mayer, it seems the only major plans Yahoo has for Tumblr (besides not screwing it up) are more opportunities for native advertising (aka advertorials or sponsored content, which Karp & Co. have been testing in the wake of earlier stumbles) in addition to implementing Yahoo search on Tumblr to start mining all that juicy millennial user data.Continue reading...

Social Shopper pioneer Collective Bias has iterated marketing messaging to new heights with a community of 1,400 influencers doing the heavy-lifting for brands.

“We believe that social shopper marketing is the evolution of shopper media, and supplants tired traditional media like FSI’s, retail circulars and digital display advertising,” said John Andrews, co-founder and CEO of Collective Bias. The company, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Arkansas, just received $10.5 million in funding led by Updata Partners to grow its platform where brands such as Tyson, Nestle and Smart & Final pay for their products to be covered by relevant bloggers who push that content across social media. 

Named one of America's Most Promising Companies in 2013 by Forbes, their proprietary Social Fabric community of shopping-centric influencers has an aggregate reach of over 50 million, as the company claims its bloggers have an average reach of 40,000.Continue reading...

Four dogs owned by American visionary John McAfee, the founder of the namesake anti-virus company of the same name, were found poisoned to death near his home in Belize more than a week ago. McAfee’s neighbor, US citizen Gregory Faull, was found dead in his home soon after, a bullet wound in his head.

McAfee was suspected, though he claims he didn’t do it. So what does he do to help prove his innocence? The 67-year-old eccentric, who resigned from McAfee back in 1994, decided to put on some disguises and go hiding along with his 20-year-old girlfriend Samantha — who has “helped (him) evade detection by grabbing (him) and kissing (him), in public, in a fashion that causes passerby's to feel embarrassment at the thought of staring and by creating emotional scenes that cause the curious to momentarily forget what they were looking for.”

How do we know such intimate details from a man who is supposedly keeping himself out of sight? Well, McAfee is blogging the whole Hollywood-esque caper, whoismcafee.com, so he could shre his thoughts about the search for him, whatever facts he can dig up in his own investigation into the murder, and his anger toward the police, the media, the Belizean government, and pretty much everybody else except Samantha and his old pal Chad Essley, the director of Portland, Ore.-based Cartoon Monkey and the man who is created the blog that McAfee is posting to, according to CBS News. It's also a huge PR nightmare for his former company.Continue reading...

Innovation is the lifeblood of any company, of course. And it has been even more important to Procter & Gamble over the last decade than to other companies. Former CEO A.G. Lafley recharged the company by emphasizing innovation during his tenure, and current CEO Bob McDonald has been struggling in part because the Cincinnati-based CPG giant has lost a bit of ground to rivals on the innovation front.

As P&G tries to regain its innovation mojo, the company is highlighting the benefits of what it's already created, in the third year of an online marketing campaign aimed at increasing appreciation of "the everyday innovation" behind brands including Bounty, Always/Tampax and Febreze.Continue reading...

Tesco CEO Philip Clarke told the World Retail Congress in London today that the "tectonic plates are shifting" in retail and residual from financial woes in the euro zone is requiring companies to adopt new technologies or lose their competitive edge.

"We are in the first downturn of the digital age," Clarke stated, adding "consumption is weakening" in China, Thailand and South Korea, regions previously earmarked for growth but reeling from economic turmoil in Europe. "[These economies] are vulnerable to the crisis in the euro zone, as well as inflation caused by high commodity prices.

"Digital technology gives us the opportunity for a warmer, more meaningful conversation with our customers, local communities, our colleagues and the suppliers we work with.” That's why Clarke, who started as Tesco CEO in March 2011, has just launched a corporate blog, Talking Shop, in an effort to build trust and, as he puts it, "explain what we are thinking and how we see the world."

He's not much of a tweeter, though he likes writing bylined op-ed pieces (such as this week's FT column). So why blog?Continue reading...

There are reportedly 4 million mom bloggers in the U.S. — passionate, increasingly influential women constantly communicating through social media.

BlogHer co-founder and COO Elisa Camahort Page, whose website draws 37 million unique visitors monthly, advises marketers to identify "focused mom blogs that share your passion—food, pets, child care, fitness, tech, whatever."  One caveat, she adds: "Mom bloggers are ruthless. The Silicon Valley adage, ‘Release early, fix later,' won't fly with moms. They have no patience for beta products or websites, and they don't give out second chances."

But they are one of the golden cohort sweet spots, and Mother’s Day is one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions of the year. Celebrations of motherhood date back to ancient festivals such as the Christian Mothering Sunday, the Roman festival of Hilaria, and the Greek cult to Cybele, but the modern U.S. holiday dates back to 1908 and Anna Jarvis’s memorial for her mother.Continue reading...

Mormons, particularly Mormon moms, are proving to be social media ninjas. They're responsible for the meteoric rise of Pinterest, as the Deseret News has noted (and those wags at Gawker). They may not seem like your typical early adopters, but credit the group's social media savvy to the women of the church who glommed onto blogging early on. It's also opening up the LDS community and church brand to the wider world.Continue reading...

Disney is acquiring Babble Media, whose New York-based parenting website Babble.com and vocal community features web savvy, hipster-leaning and well-connected parents not unlike its co-founders.

Babble was launched by Nerve Media in 2006, which made a splash with Nerve.com, a website focused on sex, relationships and culture by husband-and-wife team Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman. They even spun a book out of the site's content with The Big Bang: Nerve's Guide to the New Sexual Universe, Sex Etiquette, and Full Frontal Fiction. 

Babble.com was named by TIME as one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010 and by Forbes as one of the Top 100 Websites for Women. A stable of 200-plus mom bloggers contribute fare in the usual range of parenting topics including pregnancy, child care, health, food and family activities, as well as lifestyle topics including home, fashion and family products. Which is all well and good, but will they live happily ever after in Disney's world?Continue reading...