Friday, January 05, 2007

Direct Marketing Campaign to get a mission at Yahoo!


During the 6 last months i used to think about how to get the opportunity to bring something to Yahoo! US on product side. As I’m too young and not Stanford branded, with a bizarre deal to make (1 week at Yahoo! 1 week at school and so on during 4 months), using the HR way was not relevant to make it. So i've decided to launch a direct marketing campaign targeted on the 4 top management persons managing products BU's including the famous memo author.

I needed to surprise them and i was thinking that nobody try to contact them directly. I used a Yahoo! answers EU campaign to design 4 personalized emailing introducing my request, our shared contacts and pushing them to discuss about it together. My speech was US oriented showing my passion for the internet and my can do attitude (My vision of my professional life). I precise that i sent it without any resume but i made a "call to be redirect" on my corporate website gregorytalon.com

It's quite crazy but why could it not work? Let's try, i had nothing to loose.

I wanted them to read it and to convert (not a 0,5% conversion rate allowed), so i included the receiver picture in the creative, not only mine. I was thinking that the first reaction will be "who is that young man pretending to..." so i've put it in the creative : "Who are you?" said by the receiver. I've tested it to know if they'll receive well and not as spam, i had big issues on that point during 4 days.

Then it works one of my receivers called a shared contact to know more about me. After 3 weeks of push with US, UK and FR with 5-6 contacts across EU helping me to negotiate with US. I'll start to work for Yahoo! US and Yahoo! EU on Yahoo! users value (subject has changed, even more interesting now). We'll work as a team with my colleague Julien Marie.

7 comments:

Carl Hallard said...

well done dude !

Anonymous said...

Après mon commentaire sur le site d'Alban, je souligne à nouveau ta performance sur ton site ;)
C'était audacieux, tu l'as fait, et ça a marché ! bravo

Tu passeras le bonjour à Patrick Hoffstetter, ancien de SFR ;)

Bon courage chez Yahoo et mets nous un peu d'ordre entre Mixd, Yahoo 360, Yahoo GO, FlickR, Yahoo vidéo...etc !!

Bon vent

Gregory Talon said...

Merci pour ton avis David,
Je connais bien Patrick il dirrige la partie Produit FR (surtout édito en france).
A priori je vais plus travailler sur de nouveaux produits que sur ceux cité ci-dessus. J'ai déjà tenté de faire changer de direction Y! 360 il y a un an mais j'étais bien trop loin des responsables américains...

Anonymous said...

Well done Greg.

I'll quote Hergé: “Only those which believe in their dreams can carry them out”.

And somehow, even if we go toward strategy, I can see it's still can be helpful to have basic design and development skills, isn't it? ;)

Vincent

Gregory Talon said...

That's right Vincent! It's pretty usefull specially when i wan a job or to make some money to finance my school year ;)

Anonymous said...

Bien vu :-) Details ?

Gregory Talon said...

Thanks JP,

I'm currently working on how to maximize yahoo! mail users' value and to increase yahoo! mail added value to the Yahoo! Network. This on a blobal level. I also lead a new mail version to be launch in another country soon...