Are questions the answer in local?

Yahoo and Merchant Circle made news this week for deploying question-and-answer forum technology as a key part of their respective local strategies.

Yahoo is adding a section called Neighbors to its Yahoo Local pages and hoping to replicate the success it has enjoyed with Yahoo Answers. Merchant Circle, meanwhile, is launching two new features for its customer-facing side, one called Neighbors and one called Answers.

It’s clear that these companies see opportunities for engaging a local audience with targeted interactions. Message-board forums may seem like a 1990s approach, but with 2009 technology improving the user experience, a question-and-answer solution makes sense on a local level, providing a more effective and targeted networking opportunity than the huge, general experiences you find on Facebook and Twitter.

- Mark Briggs