• by Shankar Gupta , June 14, 2006

Yahoo this week is touting its recently launched Answers service with a new ad campaign and a three-day promotional event at the Hard Rock Café in New York's Times Square.

Yahoo Answers, launched in December, aims to harness the wisdom of the masses, relying on people's propensity to answer questions on the net--the foundation of sites like Wikipedia.org. The service allows users to post and answer questions, as well as vote on the quality and clarity of responses.

"What we've found is that people all over the world have accumulated knowledge and opinions and wisdom that they are just dying to share with other people, and so Yahoo answers really enables that," said Yahoo Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway. "We're tapping into this collective wisdom."

For the promotion at the Hard Rock Café, 22 of Yahoo Answers' top responders, dubbed "Brainiacs," are working to answer 50,000 questions in three days. In addition to the Times Square promotion, Yahoo is also launching a national radio campaign, newspaper ads in USA Today, and online, on Yahoo properties and other sites--both to drive traffic to the Answers site, and to advance the Yahoo brand as a player in the social media space, Dunaway said. "The promotion is about building awareness for Yahoo Answers, and about building traffic," she said. "A big part of our overall strategy is really being a leader in the area of social media and the area of community."