Yahoo’s official press release, posted on its Shareholders’ communication page, no less – has this for sub-head.
Promises not to screw it up.
Paragraph 2 starts with,
Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business.
Elsewhere, Tumblr’s CEO, David Karp blogs about it and ends it with,
We won?t let you down.
(Of course, he actually ends it with ‘Fuck yeah’)
Is this really a good communication strategy? The pre-empting negativity and addressing it proactively part, I mean. Is Yahoo (and Tumblr) adding more people to the list of naysayers by proactively talking about it, in such words, that too?
I do agree that Yahoo has a history of screwing things up – Geocities, Flickr and so on, but is this the best way to address all that history? From a perception-building point of view, isn’t this communication jump-starting the reader to start with the negative? Or, is it a way to say that ‘We’ve hit rock bottom so it can’t get any worse than this. So, please give us some benefit of doubt – we even used the word ‘screwed’ in our press release to make you believe us’?
Why not start it with some concrete points on what they intend to do right and let that be the start of the debate?
The online world is already full of negativity, perhaps also because Yahoo and Tumblr have accepted the fact that the world has decided that they will screw things up.
So, Business Insider reports – Tumblr’s Ad Sales Pitch Deck Says Brands Will Now Be ‘Front And Center’
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says that 72,000 blog posts exited Tumblr in 1 hour over Yahoo deal.
And, 168,739 (currently) people have signed a petition on ipetitions.com to ‘Stop Yahoo! from buying Tumblr’!
So much for a pre-emptive strategy to change perceptions.
GIF courtesy, Marissa Mayer’s Tumblr.