Yahoo entering Social Marketing...

Yahoo is gearing up to meet the giants in social networking and beat them to ground.

If you are wondering who the new Giant in the social networking is, it’s none other than Yahoo.With it’s already huge email subscriber base it expects to have a giant leap into social networking.Taking a step further than Google Buzz, Yahoo will let’s its 280 million e-mail users to exchange comments, pictures and news articles with details maintained in address books. These features will be turned on by default and users will have access to features automatically. Though users already involved in social networking might like this but others who signed up for the free service perhaps never imagining the people they e-mailed would become friends for sharing vacation videos, political causes and random thoughts throughout the day and users will have to manually unsubscribe from these features.

Privacy will be a big issue that yahoo needs to be watchful & thoughtful about. With recent Facebook incident, existing social networking have tightened up their Privacy standards with various tools/features.To allay privacy concerns, Yahoo said it would give users a week’s notice before launching the new features and provide a single button on the site for opting out entirely.Though yahoo ventured into social network earlier with connections and friends it couldn’t set its USP and tap a sizeable user segment. With this new initiative yahoo wants to turn this failure a big success.They are trying to capitalize their exisitng Email user base and also partner with Yahoo Finance, Facebook,Flickr and Twitter.

Starting 7th June, users will see notifications about these changes.User who don’t want to participate can click one button on the settings page to opt out. Or they can customize each piece of information a Facebook update or a comment on a Yahoo news story to either be shared with Yahoo e-mail contacts or Facebook.With Yahoo gearing up, google needs to watch out and be more aggresive with it’s not so successful Google buzz.