PROFILE SERIES:

Starting this week, we’ll be bringing you a step closer to the Yahoos who make stuff happen behind the scenes  as well as guests from outside of the company to share their views on various hot topics.

Joey Alarilla, a prominent (some say famous) Filipino blogger and journalist who recently joined Yahoo! as our social media editor for Southeast Asia is our first guest. Read on to find out more about his new role and how social media is playing a critical part in the Yahoo! Southeast Asia newsroom as well as the upcoming Philippine Presidential election campaigns.

Welcome to Yahoo! Can you give us a brief introduction to yourself, for example, what were you doing before joining the company?

Prior to joining Yahoo!, I was the head of the Multimedia Department of the leading online game publisher in the Philippines, Level Up! My projects there included launching our live blogging and live video streaming services and producing/hosting a weekly online show for our community.

I was a tech journalist for over a decade. In 2000, I was one of the pioneer editors who spun off the leading Philippine online news site INQUIRER.net (then called INQ7.net) from the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper. As the multimedia editor, I launched the site’s blog network and online video service, while also hosting and producing several podcasts and editing the hackenslash gaming news site. I was also the founding president of the Asian Gaming Journalists Association and a tech blogger for CNET Asia.

Could you tell us what a social media editor at Yahoo! in the Philippines does?

As the social media editor, I listen and interact with the community, not just on Yahoo! properties, but also on other social networks. My job includes understanding and monitoring what’s trending on different social networks; engaging the communities on these networks to exchange ideas and get feedback; and sharing these insights with the editorial team and our content partners.

We are also looking for more user generated content and offering platforms for our users to have their stories covered by Yahoo! and their views heard and read by more audience.

Sounds exciting! Tell us more about the social media scene in the Philippines / Southeast Asia

The social media scene is quite vibrant not just in the Philippines but across the region. It’s becoming more and more mainstream, with celebrities, journalists, politicians, and other personalities becoming more active on social networks.

One of the factors contributing to the growth of social media is the increasing popularity of the mobile Internet. You could say that social media is starting to become the new SMS. When you see people typing on their phones here, they might not be texting, but actually posting status updates on their social networks, or chatting with other online users.

While Twitter and Facebook are gaining popularity in this region, Meme from Yahoo! has a huge fan base and growing very quickly. We have introduced themed Memes for comic book lovers and cosplay and anime fans – two popular topics in the Philippines.

Can you elaborate more on why you think social media has started to become a vital part for news gathering?

News organizations have to evolve to keep pace with the changing habits of their audience. Many Internet users, especially the younger ones, have embraced social media.

Their primary source of news is no longer newspapers, television or even online news. It’s trusted users on their social networks. That explains why you have a personal newspaper service like The Twitter Tim.es, which displays news and blog links from the people you trust on Twitter – you can even check out my personal newspaper.

Increasingly, social media users are “out-scooping” the breaking news teams from mainstream media. Social media is one of the key channels for delivering news and other information. In the Philippines, in the wake of the massive flooding caused by tropical storm Ondoy (international codename: Ketsana), Filipinos relied on social networks to keep themselves informed and coordinate relief and rescue operations. Through social media, different rescue groups were able to harness the spirit of volunteerism and encourage more people to help out the flood victims.

The fact is that news organizations that fail to adapt are in danger of becoming irrelevant. They can no longer assume that users will come to them, but must instead make sure their content is available wherever their users may be.

Due to different factors, some news organizations have been slow to integrate social media into the newsroom. I’m happy to say, however, that the situation is changing. Many news organizations in the Philippines and in Southeast Asia are embracing social media. This is a new and exciting frontier for many journalists, and Yahoo! will be here to help our media partners with our own insights based on our experiences and best practices.

During the recent social media forum in the Philippines, you discussed how social media is shaping the political landscape in the Philippines; do you think the candidates really understand the benefits/ use of social media?

Social media is generating a lot of hype in the upcoming Philippine presidential elections this May. Pundits are saying this will be the first Philippine elections in which social media will potentially be a game changer.

It’s good to see that many candidates recognize the importance of social media in their campaigns – no doubt inspired by the example of US President Barack Obama. What they have to keep in mind, however, is that social media is just one aspect of the campaign, and that their success will depend on how well they integrate it with their overall strategy.

The Obama team was able to reach out via social media but the crucial step was in translating this into actual grassroots support i.e, volunteers going door to door, and voters trooping out on Election Day. Social media is not a silver bullet. It’s not the be-all and end-all of a campaign, and if candidates become shortsighted, they might end up fighting an online popularity contest instead of inspiring action among their constituents.

Moreover, I would like to see candidates focus less on bombarding followers with their messages, and instead concentrate on interacting with voters online and listening to what they have to say. Social media is a conversation, and it’s a chance for voters to truly make their voices heard.

Empowering the voters through social media is the main goal of Yahoo!’s Purple Thumb site for the Philippine elections. We also held a social media forum, to examine the impact of social media on the upcoming elections. It’s all about the community – about putting the spotlight on what ordinary people have to say about the election issues that concern them most.

Social media is your chance to be heard. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

We all know that the Web makes the world a much smaller place, and we have some great news to share today that will make your Web world smaller and easier, while at the same time expanding your social world online! We’re partnering with Twitter to integrate their real-time social experience into our global network.

What does this mean for you? Very soon, you will be able to see your Twitter feed on Yahoo! just as easily as you use Yahoo! to consume all of the other great content you love from across the Web. Through today’s partnership, along with our recently announced Facebook relationship, Yahoo! is giving your online social life wings to help you stay in touch with the people and things you care about most across the Web. It’s part of our strategy to ensure that Yahoo! delivers the people and things that matter most to you!

Want to see your friends’ latest Twitter posts? Or update your Twitter feed with stories and content from Yahoo!? Or check out trending topics and public updates? You no longer need to stop what you’re doing to see what’s going on with your Twitterverse — you’ll be able to do it all from Yahoo!.

As part of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) to make the Web more open and relevant, we’re helping you zero in on what’s important to you:

• Coming Soon: Read your personal Twitter feeds directly from Yahoo!’s many products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others — anywhere you can see Yahoo! Updates across our network.
• Coming Soon: Update your Twitter status and share content from Yahoo! in your Twitter stream — we’ve made it even easier to share what’s going on with your friends and followers on Yahoo! and Twitter.
• Coming Soon: Whenever you produce social actions on any website (like comments on articles, ratings, buzzes on Yahoo! Buzz) that you’ve allowed to appear on Yahoo! Updates, those actions can also be shared automatically with your friends on Twitter. (Pssst: Publishers and developers interested in learning more about Yahoo! Updates, including publishing directly into it or using Yahoo! Buzz or the Yahoo! Application Platform as ways of driving social traffic to your site, look here , here and here.
• Coming Soon: Yahoo! media properties like News, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports will include real-time public Twitter updates, allowing you to get a quick pulse-check on topics, trending and otherwise.
• Available Today: Yahoo! Search users will immediately see real-time Twitter results starting today.

The real-time Search integration is available immediately, with other features of the integration to be launched later this year. Go on, give it a test flight: Go to Yahoo! Search to check out how we just made your Web world smaller, yet larger at the same time.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!

Want to know what’s buzzing in Bangalore or Bollywood? Now you can, because Yahoo! Buzz is launching in India today, making it the first international version of the Web’s most visited social content service. Now, people throughout India can help bring the most buzz-worthy stories to Yahoo! India and beyond.

Today, Yahoo! Buzz in India is starting off with more than two dozen featured Indian publishers and we look forward to welcoming many more in the coming weeks and months. Since Yahoo! Buzz launched in the U.S. just over a year ago, more than 20,000 publishers from around the world have had stories “buzzed up.”

But that’s not all. We are introducing a new look for Yahoo! Buzz overall that more prominently features contributions from the site’s community. With our new “Buzz Updates” tab, we’re making it easier to follow the submitting, voting, and commenting activity of your friends and the larger Yahoo! Buzz community. And, you’ll also find it’s faster and simpler than ever to share the stories and videos you find most interesting, since we now automatically fill in the story headline and description when you submit a URL.

Take a look at the new Yahoo! Buzz:

And here’s the new Yahoo! Buzz in India:

Stay tuned for more about what’s next for Yahoo! Buzz, and in the meantime, keep buzzing and helping people find the most remarkable stories from across the Web.

Julie Demsey
Senior Director, Product Management, Yahoo! Buzz

From our travels across cyberspace, it’s pretty clear that the social part of the Internet is becoming more and more important to people. From chat to games to messaging to sharing things like news, entertainment, pictures, maps, movies and other “favorites,” users are looking for more ways to give contacts a sense of who they are and what they’re into. As social applications take the mash-up world by storm, a growing number of companies and data sources are opening up to give people the information they want, and developers are scrambling to create new applications that connect users with friends and colleagues.

Yahoo! has always been about helping users find and share information online, and we love giving our broad and loyal developer community the tools they need to keep innovating on this front. They echo our passion for creating the best Web experience for our users.

In this same spirit, we announced today that we’ve joined forces with Google and MySpace to create the OpenSocial Foundation, and will also begin supporting the OpenSocial standard. Industry consortiums such as this often start slowly and evolve over time. So far, OpenSocial is rapidly growing and adapting, but still in the early stages. We feel that this is the right step at this stage in its evolution. It’s no longer a trial balloon — it’s for real. We are taking this opportunity to help ensure websites and developers feel confident using OpenSocial as the building blocks for their new social apps.

We already offer Web services and APIs through the Yahoo! Developer Network that make it easy for developers to build applications and mashups that integrate data sources in new ways. We think OpenSocial will continue to fuel this innovation and make the Web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions.

We can only imagine the possibilities of what creative developers and publishers will do with these tools. Stay tuned for more on how we’ll be supporting OpenSocial and driving the OpenSocial Foundation to create an open and increasingly social Web.

Wade Chambers
VP of Platforms