On the heels of Friday’s blog in which I mentioned Yahoo‘s purchase of Bix.com, this weekend The Wall Street Journal reported a leaked memo from Brad Garlinghouse, a Senior Vice-President at Yahoo.  In the memo, which the WSJ calls the “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” Garlinghouse reportedly wrote:

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world…The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

Garlinghouse laments that Yahoo’s senior leadership lacks “a focused, cohesive vision” and that Yahoo’s operations are separated “into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other”.  He expresses concern over a “massive redundancy that exists throughout the organisation” and a business “that has become overly bureaucratic”.

In a summary of the “Peanut Butter Manifesto”, FT.com reported:

Mr Garlinghouse’s memo, which was directed at senior management at Yahoo, goes on to propose three main steps to reverse Yahoo’s slide. Calling for a clearer vision, he argues that Yahoo should quit non-core businesses and eliminate many of its overlapping products.

He also calls for a greater level of accountability, putting Yahoo’s main services under the control of a new group of more powerful general managers.

…

“Heads must roll,” Mr Garlinghouse concludes, with the sacking of senior executives who have failed to stop the rot and a 15 to 20 per cent cut in the company’s overall headcount. “The direction needs to come decisively from the top.”

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the internal reaction to this memo does to Yahoo’s social media plans.  Besides Bix.com, Yahoo recently purchased two other social media companies: Kenet Works and MyBlogLog.

• Kenet Works, based in Sweden, plans to “take the fixed and mobile Internet from static web pages and post-and-reply communities, to full real-time services” available to users on their mobile phones.
• MyBlogLog is a social networking community for weblog visitors.  The idea of MyBlogLog is that it ties everyone who reads a web site or blog together, allowing readers of blogs to learn about and engage with one another, so that the readers of your blog can become friends with each other – not just the person writing the blog.

If Garlinghouse’s recommendations are acted upon and Yahoo undergoes a massive re-org and leadership change, it will probably be a while before the dust settles and a cohesive, corporate social media strategy emerges.

Companies are only just starting to consider ways to exploit social media to their advantage… Case in point, in the last few months, I’ve been asked to interview for several new “social media” business development manager/evangelist positions at large companies.  Social Media is a growing area and one which has evolved through consumer interest, rather than corporate push.  It will be interesting to see how early adopters of social media react as big business starts wading in the water.  The reaction to Google’s purchase of YouTube was certainly mixed, with plenty of folks asking, “Is Google Killing YouTube?”

Yesterday, I talked a little bit about Singshot.com… Last night on Yodel Anectotal,  Yahoo, Inc. announced that it acquired Bix.com.  Bix takes things one step further than Singshot – people to judge all sorts of contests – from Karaoke to photos to dance routines to beauty to comedy and more.  It’s an interesting site, but one that parts of the site don’t appear to have much content/ user participation yet. Today, in his personal blog, Bradley Horowitz admitted, “… We need to get some cooler songs into the Bix karaoke system.” Considering the source, I’m sure it won’t be long before that changes.

In other news, this week, Reuters invested $7 million in an Austin, Texas based start-up, Pluck.  According to Pluck.com, “Pluck helps transform how publishers, media sites and major brands engage their audiences and customers to discover, create and distribute information online. Providing the technologies for content generation, syndication, social networking and news personalization, Pluck helps its customers more easily consume and leverage the new open content model that has emerged as the cornerstone of Web 2.0.”

In my opinion, social media is the next wave of revenue generation and marketing opportunity for big business.  The question yet to be answered is – How will consumers react to the commercialization of something that is supposed to be all about the user?