Corporates look at Web 2.0 to promote biz

Srinivas R

BANGALORE: It seems advertisers are finding Web 2.0 as a new tool to promote their products.

The question about the revenue model for the social networking sites is slowly being answered. Some of the companies are trying to get the user opinion/ suggestion on their products. Speaking to CyberMedia News on the sidelines of the Yahoo BIG Thinkers India series, Rishi Behal, director - Search, Yahoo Web Services India Pvt. Ltd, said that companies are looking at social networking sites for the promotion of their product.

Auto major Renault wanted user feedback on one of its products and the company posted the query on one of the social networking sites and the users responded. “More and more companies are looking at this direction. Similarly other companies such as Gillette was also planning on the similar lines,” Behal said.

Yahoo! is also planning to put up such queries from the advertisers on its Yahoo Answers. “For such queries, we cannot say how many users will respond to. For instance, for one of the question posed by Dr Abdul Kalam, over 32,000 people responded,” he said.

“Today search engines are looking at extending their search to user generated content or social networking sites. For instance, if somebody searches on Chinese Restaurant in Bangalore, search might throw up results along with the user experience with some of the restaurants. Similarly search will extend even for the images, maps etc,” he said.

In fact, Yahoo recently launched its new search engine alpha. Yahoo Alpha provides search results on the left, with dropdown boxes on the right providing access to Flickr photos, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Yahoo News, Wikipedia and Yahoo Sponsored results.

© CyebrMedia News