"I have nominated myself for a spot on the board and the annual
meeting is on June 12th," said Jackson, who is behind a shoestring
campaign which uses blogs and YouTube videos to attempt to unseat
chief executive Terry Semel. "Between now and then to get elected I
need to run a proxy contest, and that costs a lot of money."
Jackson owns just 45 Yahoo! shares, currently around
$1,200-worth, but is running an online campaign to motivate other
disaffected shareholders to back his 'plan B' for Yahoo!, which
involves firing Semel and finding a way to claw back market share
from Google.
Jackson said that he has requested meetings with management, and
that he will run for a seat on the board of the company in June,
which he says will be a costly exercise.
"The estimates are usually in the area of $200,000," he told
OUT-LAW Radio, the weekly technology law
podcast. "It's pricey, but in our shareholder group we're fortunate
that some of the members are well heeled and are interested in
pursuing that."
Jackson's is the kind of plan usually put in place by more
traditional activist shareholders, who target a company and buy
stock, and therefore control. But Jackson is trying to do it
without spending billions of dollars on shares.
"I don't have a $6 billion hedge fund so I thought how can I get
the same impact as that?" he said. "I thought, well I have my blog,
I sat down in January and recorded a YouTube video of myself making
a call to action for Yahoo! shareholders."
Jackson uses the currently fashionable tools associated with the
so-called web 2.0 phenomenon to exert an influence out of
proportion to his shareholding, gathering supporters to his cause
at almost no cost.
"It was a combination of my own blog, where people could leave
comments and make suggestions, the use of YouTube videos, where I
would give periodic updates and the third major web tool that was
used was a wiki for the actual plan B itself," said Jackson.
His efforts have met with surprising success. He now has almost
200 million shares pledged to his cause by proxy, which is $55
million-worth of stock accounting for 0.2% of the company.
Traditional activist shareholders often change the direction of a
company with as little as 0.5% of a firm.
Jackson, a business advisor in his day job, said that his new
plan for Yahoo! centres on replacing Semel as chief executive.
"We're advocating nine steps. We think the company could benefit
from a new leader," he said. "We think the company should look to
replace seven of the 10 directors. There appears to be a certain
amount of drift at Yahoo! and a lack of coherent explanation as to
what's next for this company."
