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Yahoo! Building Brand Universe
By Drew Meyers | December 1, 2006
Mashable covered an interesting story yesterday: Yahoo! is building a “brand universe”–sites around hot brands and bringing in content from all their properties such as flickr, del.icio.us, and Yahoo! Answers. Check out the Nintendo Wii site they recently launched. Supposedly, they have a list of 100 brands to build out into portals–with or without the help of each specific brand. The hope is to have brands provide them further content since yahoo! is improving brand awareness and driving some traffic (what site would complain about that?). These sites should be able to attract very targeted advertisements trying to reach certain audiences–a good way to boost revenue in theory. I love the fact that Yahoo! is trying to build communities around brands, but I’m a little skeptical they are going to put in the work to really build each specific brand community. Sure, they have message boards, but where are the forums and blogs that are more conducive to conversations? Message boards are not the best way to form a community. In addition, I think they should pull in more outside content…perhaps using a little bit of their RSS reader technology to display the most recent blogs that mention Wii. The more interactive and fresh content, the better for the user. Regardless, I feel this is a good step for Yahoo! (I actually just bought some Yahoo stock this morning prior to even reading Mashable’s blog entry).
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