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Gadfly 2.0: How One Investor Used Social Media to Shake Up Yahoo

February 22, 2008
by Mark Glaser
Blogger, PBS's MediaShift

Mark Glaser

If you’re following the twists and turns of Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo, you can’t escape one name that keeps popping up in the media: Eric Jackson. As an activist shareholder in Yahoo, he has become the voice of the opposition, calling on Yahoo to accept Microsoft’s takeover bid–or any reasonable bid. Last year, he was instrumental in raising a ruckus online over Yahoo’s poor stock performance, and helped get Yahoo CEO Terry Semel ousted.
But what’s amazing about Jackson is that unlike the big-name activist shareholders such as Carl Icahn and Daniel Loeb who have huge war chests to buy up stock, Jackson is a small fish. He only owns 96 shares of Yahoo stock. Where Jackson has innovated is in using the tools of social media to gather support from other shareholders and get the attention of the media to make his case for corporate change.

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Tagged: Microsoft, Voices, Yahoo, , , , , , | permalink
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