+15 sec of fame

Yahoo! announced today that we're launching Yahoo! Go 2.0 as "GA" (general availability), which is I guess the opposite of launching a product as "beta". Check out this article, which had a great quote from me. Also, I can't find the link, but I know the article ran in the Wall Street Journal, at least online, yesterday. Here's the quote:

"We have a very clearly stated goal, which is to be No. 1 in mobile," said Lee Ott, director of mobile product management at Yahoo. "We're making a major push to get the service out in everyone's hands."

Ott predicted that "2007 is going to be the tipping point for mobile," because finally "the phones are good enough, the networks are good enough and now, with the new Yahoo Go, the products are good enough."

Wow. I sound smart. That's so cool. I'm always nervous that I'm going to make some comment that is going to get misquoted, or that I'll say something idiotic or that I shouldn't say. So, Whew!

Add 15 seconds of fame to my fame counter.

lee


p.s. Here's a link to the WSJ article.

Congrats Will & Ellie!

Congrats to Will and Ellie! Awesome people, beautiful wedding. Enjoy the honeymoon!

The 5 D's of PR

PR is like a game of dodgeball (in the movie of the same name). It's all about the 5 D's: Dodge, Dip, Duck, Dive, and Dodge.

I sometimes have to do quite a bit of PR for work, and it's a very interesting experience. You are definitely trying to get a reporter excited about what you're doing, and give them enough info to back it up. That part is no problem; I do that in my normal life anyway.

But you definitely get a lot of questions that either a) you can't answer because you don't know or b) you don't want to answer directly for one reason or another or c) isn't related to what you're talking about.

For example, one time I was asked by a reporter during an interview about Y! Go and oneSearch something to the effect of "So tell me. What is Yahoo!'s acquisition strategy?". Excuse me? You want to know why we bought Flickr or GeoCities? I get that it's interesting, but shouldn't you ask Terry Semel or Jerry Yang? What makes you think that I'm qualified to talk to that, or even want to?

The trick of PR is to somehow get the answer to the question to be about what *you* want to talk about, and to make it be (or feel) related to the question.

How bizarre.

(It makes an enormous difference to have a great PR manager, which I do).

lee

extreme outdoors

My new favorite show is "Man vs. Wild", on the Discover Channel. Have you seen this show? Man, this guy is on crack the stuff he does. But it's really cool. And since I like spending time in the outdoors, it's really informative. Some of the stuff he does I already know from my Boy Scout days, but no Eagle Scout knows half of what this guys does in the average show.