Yahoo! Answers Case Study
Yahoo! tapped Cohn & Wolfe to launch Yahoo! Answers, an online community where people can ask and answers questions on any topic. Our goal was to generate awareness of Yahoo! Answers as a community-based resource for information, interaction and inspiration. The campaign created excitement, stimulated word-of-mouth buzz and consumer trial and distinguished Yahoo! Answers from competing search engines and portals.
The launch secured more than 110 million consumer impressions, including coverage on FOX’s “Good Day New York” and in a variety of print outlets including Metro New York, Quick & Simple, Newsday, The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle. Social media played an important role in building buzz for Yahoo! Answers with coverage in the top blogs including John Batelle’s Search Blog and TechCrunch. Yahoo! Answers quickly built a large community of users and grew from 10 million users pre-launch to 60 million users post-launch.
The newest Yahoo! offering was such a success that its main competitor Google conceded defeat. In The New York Times reporter Miguel Heft’s November 30, 2006 article, “Google Plans to Cancel Paid Service for Answers,” Tomi Poutanen, product director of Yahoo! Social Search commented that, “It has been one of our more successful launches.”