Friday, 21 January 2011

Quora - Research or Traffic? + resource of all Q& A Sites

Why use a Question and Answer Site?


Question and answers sites are not new. Yahoo answers has been around since 2005 and Yahoo! Answers staff claim 200 million users worldwide and 15 million users visiting daily; pretty impressive. So why do we need more Q & A sites?

To get an idea of the popularity of these sites and the number of questions have a look at this link here which has lots of many interesting numbers.

Well it seems people like to share with others what they know and some people like to learn by reading the questions and answers; which makes it a social exchange. Sometimes people are not able to find the exactly the right information that want using search engines, particularly for complex questions.

A Look at Quora


Quora





Much of the initial seeding and following of Quora came from the Tech sector which is in part the reason for its stellar propulsion into the media. Quora has a simple user interface and these in providing information on similar questions aims to reduce repetition, thus creating a more Wikipedia-style library of questions/answers.

Key points:

  • content indexed by Google

  • rapidly growing database of questions and answers

  • system reduces replication by merging questions

  • collaborative and open - with integration of Twitter and Facebook

  • people can write their own answers as weel as pose the question

  • Organised by topic


In Quora - what features would make it better by Andrew Cooke

We think it is early days yet for Quora and they will add more features and functionality as they gain more momentum.

What makes social Q & A different


Social Question and Sites work slightly differently to just a simple search engine question e.g. using Google. The common features amongst social Q & A sites are that people can view responses to questions, comment and reply as well as see who has made those comments.

Many sites have use incentives e.g. Mahalo Answers and Yahoo Answers. But it is the openess and connectivity and how they integrate with Facebook and Twitter that defines the social element within sites such as Quora . These sites thrive based on people's natural social and inquisitive nature.

How will businesses and brands use Q & A sites like Quora?


These are the main opportunities to explore and review:

Customer Service/PR

  • Brands will need to monitor these sites and ensure accuracy of information about brands/products/services so that brand reputation is maintained. However, Brands will always need to monitor the broader social networks (as well as have dedictaed support channels)  to understand customer service issues . Q&A sites (particulalry those that have high visibility) do need to be monitored and moderated closely.


Customer/Competitor Research

  • Deep Research - These sites are not good for any deep level of research. Whilst you may have masses of followers single questions rarely are sufficient to fulfil any serious research need. Surveys are much better for this (see online survey tools below).

  • Light research - these tools are excellent for competitor listening and brand monitoring. Of course this does depend on your industry and the user base of the Q & A site you choose. But following people in your industry whether they are experts or competitors may provide some useful insights.


Customer engagement

  • Brands can use sites like Quora to invite people to participate with them and to be seen to value their opinions. By asking questions about likes, passions, interests brands can gain some insights much in the same way they would use a focus group. The possibilities are vast. But brands need to be cautious that they don't set false expectations with people and don't create user fatique by asking too many questions. For engagement the answer is in the question.


Mashable details some more ways to use Quora that worth exploring and could be replicated across other Q & A sites.

Some thoughts on the future - Knowledge is Power but is it Democratised


Knowledge has up until recently had a high price. But as technology has facilitated crowd sourcing, sites like wikipedia, slideshare, docstoc... the ability to gain knowledge, aggregate and share it has made knowledge more univerally accessible and lowered the cost of knowledge.

The level of participation from people is incredible and this for the most part is done for free. There are sites that use rewards and money as incentives but there are more than do not (the quality argument comes in here).

Collectively gathering this knowledge is one thing, but accessing it and mining it are another. Perhaps this is the future possibility that many of these platforms have as an ultimate goal; the deliver to customers of a personal service through intelligent agents at the moment in time when needed. Artificial Intelligence has made swift progress in recent years - see these:

Further, if as studies suggest, companies spend $8 billion per year on consumer research. But we are all contributing more data and sharing our personal information each day through Facebook's open graph, Twitter....combine these attitudes, opinions....and together you have the new 'oil' that is data.

SMB's and Enterprise


We have detailed the main generalist sites but we thought we would also add two other parts. Firstly there's a Q&A site called Focus.com that is intended specifically for SMBs.

Secondly if we pick up on the idea of knowledge management and routing questions to the right people there are two internal enterprise solutions worth looking at.

Opzi

Opzi is an internal Q&A site. It uses a Yammer-like model: users sign-up with their company e-mail address and then they can ask and answer questions specific to their company.

MindQuilt

MindQuilt promotes itself as a knowledge base focused on routing questions to the appropriate person.

The main Q & A sites and a full list of others


Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo answers is large Q&A and second to Answers.com for numbers of users.

Key points:

  • reward system for participating; levels and points (gaming)

  • asking questions costs (5 pts)

  • users can vote (thumbs up) to the quality of your answer

  • well populated knowledge base

  • easy user interface and indexed on Google

  • Social sharing is limited e.g. Delicious bookmarking


Mahalo Answers



Mahalo offers the ability for those who seek answers to give tips to the best response. Integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Open ID and Linkedin.

There are different karate belt levels depending on how many points you’ve earned and your belt color determines how frequently you can post or ask questions; which leads to money.

Each Mahalo search results page includes links to the top seven sites, as well as other categorized information, and additional web pages from Google.

Linkedin Answers



LinkedIn Answers is a service similar, in essence, to Google Answers or Yahoo Answers. LinkedIn is quite different to many of the social networking sites online. It is positively geared towards businesses and business members. Since peoples profiles are linked to the question and answer you can judge how well qualified the response. It is a great tool for exploring opinions and thought within the business community. Limited capability to share.

Answers.com



Answers.com delivers responses from users as well as quality information from reference sites such as like Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary.

Answers.com provides a number of videos to help with using it. Using Twitter and Answer.com - Answers.com Starts Answering Questions On Twitter

Formspring




Formspring.me is a question and answer social networking site which allows users to ask questions on a variety of topics. The site has social networking features such as friends, following and messaging. Questions are considered to be messages on the site and users can find their friends by searching the Formspring.me site, via email address, or with Facebook or Twitter.


Facebook Questions

Facebook Questions lets Facebook users ask their friends, or Facebook users at large, questions on any subject. These questions can be tagged to fit into various categories and written up just like any other update from the top of Facebook profile pages.

Following the trend of making Facebook pages more public, question pages are seen by anyone on the service. Facebook is encouraging users who want to ask private questions to use Facebook's private messaging system instead. This has the possibility to trounce any competitor site and be a serious distractor for other players Quora.





Answerbag is also another user-powered Q&A community. Questions and Answers are listed in different categories while you can rate up and down any of the answer depending on its accuracy.

Fluther



Twitter announced that it has acquired software company Fluther in December of last year. Fluther describes itself as a "free Q&A collective that specializes in getting fast answers from the right people." .This is a recognition of Twitters need to expand its platform capabilities and range of services.

Others



How you can use Q & A sites


There is a high level of interest in Q&A sites and inparticular Quora. What does mean; well simply put it is about traffic and eyeballs. If you have a question that stands out and has a high following/response rate then the probability it will transfer into traffic to your website or other social networks.

Why you should use them

From a  business perspective (and it depends on your business) these sites can be used as light research tools, but some are better than others. You need to consider what your objective, who you want to reply and what you are trying to find out - what is the question e.g. research on Facebook answers and Linkedin answers provides you with very different audiences.

Getting to know your market/customers - Focused Research

If you want to conduct some more in depth research with customers use a survey detailed below is a list of sites.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey offers a popular online hosted survey tool that works well for basic surveys. They offer a free version and a Pro version - at about $20/month or $200/ year.

Zoomerang

Zoomerang is similar to SurveyMonkey in many respects, but offers in general a somewhat more powerful package for somewhat more money. Like SurveyMonkey, they offer a very limited free package; the more useful advanced package is offered to nonprofits for $350 per year for unlimited surveys, questions and respondents.

SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo offers a low cost solution with some advanced features. The free version supports 250 responses per month; they also have a range of more advanced packages from $20/month to $160/month.

PollDaddy

PollDaddy offers surveys surveys and polls that can be easily embedded into external websites and applications. They offer the ubiquitous free package, with a maximum of 10 questions and 100 survey responses per survey. More advanced versions cost between $20/month and $100 /month.

How are you using Question and Answers sites?


Survey sites
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