I was lucky enough to go to a lunchtime talk by Glen Drury, Yahoo Vice President responsible for Northern Europe earlier this week. The talk and QA session was the first ‘food for thought’ speaker lunch orgainised as an internal communications activity by our Consumer Marketing Communications Team. It was a small but seriously interested audience, and Glen was a very engaging speaker. Some of the things he said on ‘connectiveness’ really got me thinking…

Glen really displayed a strong passion for Yahoo and their web strategy, nicely summed up I thought as ‘Yahoo is about connecting – with people, with information, with communities’. Glen was impressively open about the challenges and tough choices being explored by Yahoo – he even discussed the infamous Peanut Butter memo in some detail (“many of the senior Yahoo team expressed the same thoughts, they maybe should have done more to play up the memo when it leaked”).

One success story Glen was obviously very pleased with is Yahoo Answers. He gave the example of how the AA used Yahoo Answers to illustrate how brands can use social media to interact with customers and ultimately advertise whilst adding customer value. It made me think that Yahoo should look to find ways to offer Answers as a managed service as quickly as possible.  Imagine a Yahoo powered ‘Vodafone Customer Service Answers’ site where customers and advisors could interact over the web to solve inquires and resolve issues. Customers could be rewarded for sharing their knowledge, crowd wisdom could help find the best answer to a query all done quickly and relatively cheaply over the web!