Facebook's IPO is a huge milestone for a company that is arguably unlike any other to come before it. Launched in 2004 from a university dorm room, Facebook has risen to become more than just a multi-billion dollar consumer internet star -- it's a cultural phenomenon used by close to a billion people. But the company's public debut is hardly the end of the story Mark Zuckerberg wrote. Instead, it's just the beginning of what could prove to be either one of the greatest tech investment opportunities ever or a passing fad that brought irrational exuberance back to internet stocks. Which one will it be? Naturally, it depends on who you ask. On one hand, Facebook is a force to be reckoned with. It has nearly a billion users, billions in revenue, one of the best-recognized brands in the world and some of the best engineering talent in Silicon Valley. Facebook boosters thus argue that the company is just getting started and its best days are ahead of it. On the other hand, Facebook's current valuation is based on its potential more than its relatively modest earnings and faces significant challenges in realizing all of its potential, including mobile. Skeptics will point out that the company is no spring chicken, saw a quarter-over-quarter revenue decline last quarter and that key insiders are selling in the IPO, hinting that they may believe Facebook's valuation has peaked (or is close to peaking). One thing is for sure: the initial movement in FB shares (up or down) in the next hours, days and weeks will make for great entertainment, but it's what happens in the coming months and perhaps even years that will determine whether Facebook is the next Google, or the next Groupon.

Driving the mobile usage surge is the proliferation of smartphone growth. IDC recently revealed that 59% of all mobile phone owners possess a smartphone as opposed to a basic mobile device, with that percentage expected to rise sharply over the next five years as smartphones continue to replace traditional handhelds. Mobile-social growth impacts everyone, from consumers to brands to investors, though for slightly different yet similar reasons. Facebook needs to monetise that growing number of mobile users without disrupting the user experience.  Too many ads, users cringe. Too few ads, revenue decreases and the markets notices. Today’s social marketer needs to stay on top of these trends as consumers are increasingly interacting with content via smartphones. Marketers must understand the demand that puts on their social content strategy.  As social matures, led by Facebook, brands will need to develop a more integrated POEM (Paid, Owned & Earned) strategy. Facebook underscored this with the introduction of Sponsored Stories and Reach Generator. Consumers are increasingly making the social web the center of their digital world. Yesterday’s brand website is becoming today’s Facebook Page. But this presents incredible opportunities. Below are just a few key ideas for marketers to consider as they strive to better reach today’s mobile-social consumer:  Mobile optimisation now includes social  With more people accessing Facebook via mobile Web, Facebook announced at Mobile World Congress that the company is focusing on building out more effective mobile solutions to aid in app discovery, payments and mobile browser fragmentation.  Marketers should be eager to execute on the bevy of new opportunities this presents to optimise content for mobile and achieve maximum engagement and effectiveness. If you don’t, then you are missing almost 50% your audience, with 488m monthly mobile users (and growing) on Facebook. Bridge the digital & physical worlds Effectively engaging your social consumer while on the go provides many added benefits. Think commerce, location-based apps, and real-time targeting. Mobile marketing allows brands to reach and engage with a consumer when they are closest to activities such as shopping and eating. Delivering consumers real-time deals and coupons by location and activity can achieve tremendous results.  It’s about delivering relevant content at the opportune time.  It’s the blending together of the digital and physical worlds, giving brands a chance to expand and enhance the consumer relationship.  Understand behavior and usage differences As consumers continue to upgrade from traditional cellphones to smartphones, mobile behavior will further evolve, and marketers must stay abreast of the latest mobile consumer behavior data. If you understand the behavior and usage differences, you can deliver more relevant and engaging content.  In our white paper, Social Mobile User Engagement, we explored performance metrics via mobile including: image and text posts perform better; Thursdays – Sundays are more effective posting days; shorter posts are more effective; and post with links receive higher engagements, to name a few.  Further, as smartphone usage expands and speed and download times increase, look for video and rich media content engagement to also increase. Facebook recently unveiled new App Insights metrics, offering mobile referral data from their dashboard to help “understand the traffic your app receives from Facebook mobile sources” and “continue optimising distribution via mobile social channels”. Ensuring that a Facebook app is Flash-free and optimised for whichever screen users are using is vital. Facebook’s new App Insights metrics is a great tool for helping marketers understand where broken experiences may be occurring and helping them hone in on behavior and usage differences between mobile and non-mobile devices.  In the mobile kingdom, content remains king Facebook had never talked so much about mobile than it did at its Facebook Marketing Conference (fMC) earlier this year. It has continued that focus leading up to its IPO.  Revealing Timeline for brand pages, unveiling ads for mobile devices along with several other features and functions, Facebook showed it understands how the location of premium ads needs to be different in a mobile environment vs. desktop web.  All of this followed Twitter’s announcement they it is expanding its mobile advertising strategy, “making promoted tweets visible in its apps for iPhone and Android devices”. All of these upgrades are about content – promoting and highlighting premium content in feeds is just one piece of the puzzle. To garner attention, the content still has to be engaging, feel personal to the consumer, and exhibit relevance. In conclusion The industry is still in the very early stages of the mobile-social revolution, but we know this space will move forward rapidly, bringing changes, developments and opportunities daily.  From our own data, we see that mobile engagement on Facebook more than doubled in just six months for the brands we manage. The percentage of Likes from mobile across our client base went from around 15% in the middle of last year to 40% of all Likes by December. We expect that to hit 60% by the end of the year. By staying focused and having the right partners, marketers can achieve success with today’s new mobile-social consumer.

Multi-screen usage  Stats from our Multi-Screen Marketer report, produced in association with the IAB, show that 65% of the respondents with a tablet in our study said they were likely to be using a second device while watching television. Even most people with only two screens (TV + computer) are more likely to be online while watching than not (52%). Multi-screening can be positive for publishers and advertisers. Those with tablets are significantly more likely (47%) to take an action (voting, purchasing, etc.) in response to what they’re watching than their peers with three screens (37%).  47% of tablet owners have used a mobile device to respond to something on the screen and 28% have downloaded an application that’s related to a show they watch. Chance of using a mobile device to take action from television prompt: Mobile web usage Almost two-thirds of UK smartphone owners (59%) access the mobile internet everyday, according to stats from Google.  85% of UK mobile users seek local information on their smartphone, and 81% take action using the local content. Mobile search has grown 500% in the past two years. Online research and in-store purchases More than a third of Homebase customers research online before going in-store, according to the retailer's Head of Multichannel Andy McWilliams. Reducing online returns rates By using the Shoefitr tool, which helps shoppers to find the best fit for them, US retailer Running Warehouse has reduced fit-related returns by 23%.  The app has enabled Running Warehouse to increase its profit margins by 2.5%.  Previously, around 65% of the retailer returns were due to size related issues, but now 20% of orders come in from customers that have used the app.  Social media and customer service More than a third of UK consumers (36%) have engaged with brands through social media, according to a survey from Fishburn Hedges. 68% of those who have engaged with brands through social media believe that it “allowed them to find their voice”. More than two-thirds (65%) also believe that it is a better way to communicate with companies than call centres. Twitter's mobile users Twitter now has 10m UK users, of which 80% access the site using mobile. This makes the UK Twitter's fourth largest audience behind the US, Brazil and Japan. It has 140m users worldwide.  Tablets One tablet generates as many website visits as four smartphones, according to data from Adobe's Digital Index Report. By the end of Q1 2012 smartphones accounted for 6.1% of site visits compared to 4.3% on tablet (mainly iPad). Within a year of its launch in Q2 2010 the iPad accounted for 1% of total website visits, reaching 4.3% of total visits by the end of 2011. Facebook and customer acquisition More than a third of UK businesses (36%) now use Facebook to attract new customers, according to data from Basekit. This makes it more popular as an advertising tool than local business directories such as Yellow Pages and Thomson, which are used by 27% of the 500 small businesses surveyed. The use of online advertising is now almost as common as print advertising (20% vs. 21%), and Twitter is also quickly gaining popularity (17%). Marketing emails and mobile Research by STEEL finds that 36% of all consumers are already reading marketing emails on a mobile device. This figure rises to 55% for 18-34s.  However, one in four find marketing emails too difficult to read on their mobiles.  The top area of dissatisfaction is too much scrolling (42%), while 29% state that the layout of emails isn't right for their mobile device and 27% feel there is too much content.  Reasons for opening emails on mobile: Shazam and TV ads According to ITV and Shazam, around 50,000 viewers used the Shazam app to tag the Pepsi MAX and Cadbury ads shown during ad breaks in Saturday’s Britain’s Got Talent final. Shazam recently announced a partnership with ITV to provide interactive TV ads. 

Volume The sheer number of tweets is likely to be a major influence, not least because it’s one of the easiest things for Google to figure out.  Research from Branded3 showed some strong correlations between rankings and retweet volume. It found that the more (re)tweets, the higher the rankings. If you can muster a whopping 7,500+ retweets then you might find yourself on the first page of Google, according to this study.  Average retweet volume Let’s say Google has figured out that I average 200 retweets for every new blog post that I publish. If I write a post that generates 2,000 retweets then that might wave a big flag in its face. Context and comment Last year I wrote about how to extract meaning from retweets. Some people will retweet others verbatim, without appending their own comments or views. I much prefer to see the tweets that say “great post” or “rubbish post”. Google might take notice of these nano reviews, just as I do.  The ‘65 character rule’ for headlines should be adhered to if you want to encourage people to add comments to retweets. Bio information What keywords are in your bio? Do they match the content and focus of your Twitter feed? What about your followers, and the people you are following? If Google make sense of your interests, expertise and influence then it stands to reason that it might use this knowledge when calculating search placements. Human-powered accounts vs feeds It is really easy for a human to spot a Twitter account that is purely automated. Google should be able to take notice of this too, to discount accounts that have no conversational tweets or only ever share links to one source. Reach Your own network of followers will be responsible for driving the majority of retweets, at least initially. But sometimes one or more tipping points are reached and many people from outside your network will share your content. I think of this as ‘the Kevin Bacon effect’, and it’s potentially something Google could consider when sniffing around social platforms for information. Frequency How often do you share content on Twitter? Low volume accounts with a high velocity of retweets suggest authority, for example @ThisIsSethsBlog (although points may be deducted for automation and a thorough absence of conversation). Retweeter authority Who is doing the tweeting? How much of an authority are they on the subject that they are tweeting about? If Avinash Kaushik retweets one of our analytics-themed blog posts then will Google give us a little extra love? That stands to reason, from where I’m sitting. Conversational vs link-based tweets Google will take particular care over tweets containing links, since links continue to make Google’s world spin. But to what degree might conversation-based tweets impact rankings, if at all? Will Google only take notice of tweets with links in them, or is there a bigger picture to look at? Remember that we all talk about brands on Twitter without necessarily linking to them. Follower vs following ratios If you’re lucky enough to have 100,000 followers but only follow 100 people then Google may well assign VIP status to you and your tweets. Retweets from celebrities will be even more sought after. Spam followers There are tools that you can use to remove spammers who are following you. This is a good idea, even if it does reduce your follower numbers (artificially inflated by morons, so don’t worry about it). If Google starts to take notice of the proportion of spammers following Twitter accounts then it will become the hygienic thing to do. Verified accounts Presumably this is at the very least an indicator of credibility.  What do you think? What social signals do you think are the most important for Google?

The Potential Of Facebook’s Newsfeed Ads vs. IPO valuation (Webtrends) Why do users become disengaged with your email? (Litmus) The ultimate mobile web infographic (Bootstrapper's Guide) Bounce rate demystified (KISSmetrics) This is actually an old one, but a) I haven't seen it before and b) it's good...  Facebook vs Google Display Network (Wordstream) The ROI of tag management (Tealium) (From Econsultancy's The ROI of Tag Management report.)

1.  Can you COPE? COPE, as in Create Once Publish Everywhere. Originally this phrase was simply a sell for clever publishing software. It’s now become shorthand for planning and creating content that can be published and re-used across many platforms, ideally cutting the cost of creation, production and (especially) translation and localisation. Lately we’ve heard it bandied about a lot in editorial meetings. Obviously if you are going to publish the same content (or elements of the same content) across many platforms, you’ll need to indulge in some pretty sophisticated content planning work first. If your company operates in a series of content silos, with one team ‘doing email’ and another responsible for ‘social’, you’ll struggle to get this off the ground. But if you can join your internal content owners up to develop a truly inclusive content strategy, then COPE may well prove efficient for you. On a practical level, for written content, this will usually mean coming up with highly adaptive modular copy formats that everyone signs off on and subscribes to. Cue stakeholder pistols at dawn…  2. Post-Panda SEO for peanuts? You can’t stuff your content with keywords any more. So what now? Those whose businesses stand or fall on their search results are out there trying to source content that will both keep customers engaged and satisfy a Google algorithm that rewards content quality. But how much are they willing to invest in it really? As far as we can see, the SEO copywriting market has polarised. While we can report a recent large influx of clients prepared to invest in quality copywriting, along with the editorial planning, format work and quality control that requires, we also notice a proliferation of extremely low-cost content providers. There will always be people prepared to churn out repurposed gobbledegook for buttons (£6.50 for 700 words, anyone?) and also those who insist that software could “seriously, like, replace Shakespeare”. But the truth is that anyone who is prepared to write you an on-brand, optimised, customer-facing, usable piece of content, mapped to your business objectives, legally compliant, sub-edited and proofread for a fiver, is either living in a country where that’s a day’s wages, living off a trust fund or has repurposed it from someone else’s work. Really good content costs. Sorry. 3. Micro-content fixes The rise of the copy nudge. The double-dip has forced companies to focus even more on the bottom line. So what content gives the greatest return on investment? Last year we started suggesting that budget-strapped content owners identified quick copy fixes with high ROI. After all, if your conversions increase as a result of your emails, then why not focus on a more compelling email sign-up, or on messages which dissuade customers from unsubscribing? Re-working a key call to action, a button, or split-testing the benefits on a product page is quick to do, requires minimal design input and can produce instant results. The king of all quick copy fixes is the online form. We have case studies showing up to a 35% increase in conversions from fixing the reassurance and instructional text in transactional areas. So maybe instead of that big ambitious content migration, you should simply ‘sweat the small stuff’ instead? 4.  Mobile, tablet and yet more mobile Making content mobile and tablet friendly is definitely what’s keeping content owners up at night. Last year, Jakob Nielsen revealed that content is twice as hard to understand on a mobile device. "When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores," he reported. So what is the answer? In short: write short, clear sentences. What’s the problem? This is very hard to do well, especially when summarising the terms and conditions of a home contents insurance policy. And what about tablet? While we’re still in learning mode as to what works best, certain content issues are already pretty clear. Overly-long lists and menus, information ‘too small to tap’ and serving up splash screens are all out. It appears you do need a distinct content approach for tablet after all… 5. Govern or be damned "Quality is doing it right when no one is looking," said Henry Ford. Unfortunately, all the best editorial set-ups rely on lots of people looking. Looking, editing, checking, and then looking again in fact. While most content teams weren’t initially set up with anything like this kind of QA process in place, we are seeing a rise in demand for content training and guidelines which support governance and help benchmark content quality. For many clients this is ensuring that (a) best-practice samples and execution guidelines exist for each content typeand (b) someone is making sure they actually get followed. For others, this means regular content auditing followed up by training and mentoring. It’s fantastic to finally see the old-school rigour of print publishing being embraced by the digital world. Better content should come of it. 6. Content ideas brainstorm boom The trend to embrace content marketing as a discipline in itself continues apace. But this is primarily an editorial endeavour. And great editorial depends on an ongoing flow of high-quality ideas. When the ideas run out, it’s all over. As original ideas can be hard to find (especially for the more complex B2B brands), the ability to brainstorm clever content ideas, formats and executions has become powerful content-marketing currency. What marketers are after is ‘ideas with legs’, workable series of content that can be replicated week after week without flagging. Content mapped to customer needs and interests that is truly useful, usable and builds long-tail relationships. In his post-Panda blog post  Google fellow Amit Singhal advises content owners to avoid ‘mass produced’ content that is ‘shallow in nature’, and to strive for high-quality ‘original content’. He urges us to produce articles full of ‘interesting information that is beyond obvious’ and remove low-quality content from our websites. And this is the biggest content trend of all: the culling of poor-quality content is finally beginning to happen. And we can’t wait to see the results...  

The news organization's tablet usage (mostly iPad) begins first, at five in the morning, with print following shortly thereafter. As people transit to and arrive at work those consumption methods fall precipitously. Subsequently, mobile phone and desktop access rise, then hold steady throughout the remainder of the working day. Tablet usage begins to pick up again in the evening, and usage of WSJ Live, the company's streaming video app, peaks in the evening at 10pm. Shapira said that this is evidence of either digital video consumption replacing television, or, additive second-screen viewing.  In either case, this level of advanced penetration of owned properties throughout an array of devices and content-formats is an impressive success for the 123 year old brand.  In part, the success of these products is no doubt attributable to the company's aggressive participation in numerous public-ish social media channels. According to a shared slideshow from March, the company maintains over 100 Twitter accounts, with over 2m followers. Social sharing within Facebook is the largest source of traffic referral, and the company maintains 14 brand pages with 600k likes. The company has additionally embraced Pinterest, and is active on Instagram, where it has over 15k followers. As brands consider implementing content strategies, they would be wise to pay attention to publications like this. At one point, the Wall Street Journal was just a newspaper. Now, it has the potential to poach eyeballs away from TV advertisers. It isn't that every brand should desire to become a full-fledged news service, it's that the opportunity to deeply penetrate into the lives of consumers is there, for those who can figure out how to do it.

There has been a great deal of attention and research directed at the multi-screen recently, and with good reason. 65% of the respondents with a tablet in our study said they were likely to be using a second device while watching television...and that number goes up for those 18-44 years old. Even most people with only two screens (TV + computer) are more likely to be online while watching than not (52%). The Multi-Screen Marketer explores some of the effects of these behaviors, and tries to lay out an approach for publishers and advertisers. How does the distraction of the second screen affect attention?  When someone has another device at the ready, their attention can shift from the screen the moment they lose interest. Whether it's a commercial break or just a break in the action, they're off and mentally running. Studies have already shown that commercial blocks invite the heaviest multi-screen behavior. We wanted to measure how this could impact advertiser recall. Respondents were asked to identify their favorite television program, and then asked if they could identify specific advertisers associated with it. We expected that the less people fit the mold of the multi-tasker, the more they would recall, but that's not what we found. Overall, 46% of survey takers were able to identify between one and three advertisers. Surprisingly, four screened respondents (TV, computer, smartphone and tablet) were more likely (53%) than those with only two screens (42%). Again, younger tablet owners did even better...61% could recall at least one advertiser. Of course, this doesn't capture some very important pieces of information; we don't know anything about messaging recall or sentiment. You can be sure that studies will fill in these gaps. Does the type of content (TV program) correlate with multi-screen behaviors? Television programs aren't all the same, even if it feels that way when you've got a remote in your hand. Respondents were asked to identify their preferred program types (procedurals, sports, reality, etc.) and given three randomly chosen questions about their behaviors from a total of six possible questions (to avoid overload). Three of the behaviors were "commercial" - related to online shopping, product searches, etc., while the others related to general online surfing and searching for media-related information. Findings are broken down in detail within the report but one of the highlights was discovering that independent drama (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc.) is a hotbed for both commerce and non-commerce related second screen behaviors. People are somewhat more likely to shop for products they've seen during the program (show + commercials) and to do things like connect on social networks, than during any other program type. At the other end of the spectrum are procedural dramas. Where are we headed? Connected TV is already here, but few people have bought them so far, and those that have often aren't using them to their full potential. We asked respondents to describe television of the future and the televisions of the future, and to gauge the impact of these expected changes. At the top of the list is the ability to watch anything, anywhere, anywhen. Not surprising and unlikely to be fulfilled any time soon, because of the basic business models of the primary players. The second highest priority is for a television that listens and more importantly, does what we tell it. Voice recognition scored well, as people acknowledge that between multiple remotes, hundreds of channels and piles of accessories, it can be complicated to find or record the content we want.  Other top priorities center around the multi-screen experience. People expect to be able to watch programming on any device, and then move it simply from one device to another as they travel. Naturally, we gravitate to the best available device, but often that is the most available device. Watching a film on a smartphone is sub-optimal, unless you're on a subway, in which case it's sublime. Other Findings The Multi-Screen Marketer looks at a number of other topics including how social is really a private activity, how multi-screeners use online information during the purchase process and how TV viewing is shared among devices. Thanks to the sponsorship of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the report is available to all Econsultancy members, bronze and higher.

At the time, it was clear that Johnson was taking some cues from Apple. Make things simple, and the market will reward you. What wasn't clear was whether or not Johnson's strategy would work. Some liked it, while others suggested it could be disastrous. Unfortunately for J.C Penney and its shareholders, the new approach isn't producing the expected result. Last Wednesday, the company reported its earnings for Q1 2012 and the numbers were ugly. Same-store sales dropped nearly 19%. Online sales plummeted 28%. All told, J.C. Penney reported a net loss of $163 million, or 75 cents per share; analysts had expected a net loss of just 8 cents per share. Not surprisingly, the results have sent J.C. Penney shares reeling. They're down more than 20% in the past week, and the company has suspended its dividend to save cash. And it appears things might get worse as reports say that the retailer is looking to wholesalers for steep discounts. The cause of J.C. Penney's disastrous quarter isn't hard to identify: shoppers aren't liking its new pricing. As C. Britt Beemer, chairman of consumer research firm America's Research Group, told the AP, "Consumers want deals, and they're willing to wait for them...When you train customers to shop at big discounts, that customer is not going to change". In other words, J.C. Penney might be offering merchandise to customers at great prices, but they simply won't recognize that they're getting a good deal because, for better or worse, there's no, well, "deal." The result: they don't buy. For his part, Johnson believes he made the right move, and is confident that in time, J.C. Penney customers (or, more accurately, former customers) will come to their senses. Clearly, Wall Street's reaction to the early results indicate that investors aren't so sure about that. There's a timely lesson here for companies using the internet to acquire new customers or reward existing customers. Whether you're promoting a daily deal on Groupon or offering a coupon for a Facebook 'Like', discounts usually carry a cost. When customers come to expect those discounts, the cost is easy to significantly underestimate. This, of course, doesn't mean that all discounting is bad. Coupons and deals are valuable tools when applied appropriately. But when a brand becomes known for its discounts, as was the case with J.C. Penney, it can be very, very painful to separate The Brand from The Deal.

Not buying or licensing Google's technology in 1998 In 1998, Google's two young co-founders approached Yahoo when they were making the rounds for backing in Silicon Valley. According to a book written by John Battelle, that opened the door to an investment, licensing deal or an outright acquisition of the duo's technology. But Yahoo (and other major players) weren't interested. Turning to Google for search results in 2000 Two years later, at the height of the first .com boom, Yahoo saw that search was becoming far more important than it had anticipated and it looked to third parties for search technology while it worked on its own. One of those third parties was upstart Google, which it struck a deal with to power search on yahoo.com. That deal, of course, was far more favorable to Google than any deal would have been in 1998. Paying billions for Broadcast.com in 1999 While Yahoo's 1999 acquisition of Broadcast.com for $5.7bn didn't kill Yahoo, it is arguably one of the worst-timed acquisitions in tech M&A history, and one has to wonder how the ill-fated acquisition impacted Yahoo in subsequent years. Not buying Google in 2002. According to reports, Yahoo had the opportunity to purchase Google for $5bn in 2002. Although that price was high for Yahoo in relation to its own value at the time, it would prove to be the last chance Yahoo would have to acquire Google. It didn't, and the rest is history. Failing to take full advantage of its Overture acquisition Google AdWords may be the king of pay-per-click advertising, but the model was pioneered by Overture, a company Yahoo acquired in 2003 for $1.4bn. As part of a patent lawsuit settlement, Google obtained a perpetual license to a key Overture patent that would spell trouble for AdWords. The price: 2.2m shares of Google stock. While there were questions about the legitimacy of Overture's patent, and some suggested it would be found to be invalid, in retrospect, Google got a bargain of a settlement. Hiring Terry Semel as CEO Some consider Yahoo's second CEO, Terry Semel, the worst tech CEO in history. While that may not be entirely fair, one thing is hard to dispute about Semel's reign at Yahoo: with his total compensation pegged at some $500m or more over his tenure, he has done far better than the company he ran. Botching the Flickr and Delicious acquisitions While there's no denying that Web 2.0 upstarts Flickr and Delicious wouldn't have saved Yahoo, the company's failure to manage the assets it purchased, particularly given its built-in audience, represented another huge missed opportunity that could have helped Yahoo find its way on the modern internet. This excellent article from gizmodo looks more deeply into this. The restrictions on Flickr's mobile development is a particular missed opportunity, opening the door for the likes of Instagram.  Not buying Facebook If watching as its Flickr and del.icio.us acquisitions stagnated or went south wasn't bad enough, Yahoo's failed attempt at acquiring the social networking behemoth adds insult to injury.   As the story goes, Yahoo was nearly able to acquire the popular social network in 2006 for $1bn but due to a faltering stock price, Yahoo lowered its offer to $850m, allowing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to walk away from the deal. This Friday, Zuckerberg and company will take 900m-plus user strong Facebook public at a valuation exceeding $100bn. Rejecting Microsoft's buyout offer Yahoo has made plenty of bad moves in acquiring (or not acquiring) other companies, but its crowning failure was its handling of its own potential sale. In 2008, the Redmond software giant, eager to compete with Google, was willing to pay $44bn for Yahoo, but thanks to what many considered gross incompetence, Yahoo's board rejected the offer. Today, Yahoo's market cap sits at just below $19bn. Partnering with Microsoft Months after having failed to make it to the altar with Microsoft, the worst financial crisis in decades hit. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, must have breathed a sigh of relief and he capitalized on his luck by inking a partnership that gave him most of what he wanted without having to buy Yahoo.   While this deal may have been a convenient way to turn back the hands of time for Yahoo, at least partially, it was a far better deal for Microsoft, and didn't help Yahoo answer any of the fundamental questions crucial to its future.