I’ve been told I’m an early adopter, but others are earlier. At adopting that is. In fact, when it comes to early adopters, I like to sleep in.
That was the case with Quora, the new (or not so new depending on who you ask) social network based on questions. Quora’s been around for a few months, but I only heard about it two weeks ago. The amount of “I just answered this question on Quora” posts in my friends Facebook and Twitter feeds have been on the rise for those two weeks, yet I had only spent five minutes on Quora before yesterday afternoon.
I didn’t get it at all at first, but I think I may have finally figured it out…or at least I’ve figured out one way companies can see a lot of value from investing time in the platform. People talk about epiphanies, but I’m not a fan of the term. Still, this may have been as close as I’ve come to one in a while. We’ll call it a mini-epiphany. No voices spoke to me or anything. But I suddenly saw the value in Quora and I started to get excited. Stick with me for a bit and I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.
Back to basics first. What is Quora? Well, it’s a social question asking and answering experience online. Think LinkedIn Answers, but less spammy (so says my colleagues Lauren Fernandez). People ask questions and people answer them. Answers can be voted up and down. Questions are categorized by tags and keywords. You get the picture.
The first time I checked it out was last week after I saw Beth Harte post about it on Facebook. I clicked over, spent five minutes, got nothing out of it (I mean, I gave it a whole five minutes) and then posted an “I don’t get Quora” comment on Beth’s status. But a lot of my peers like Heather Whaling were getting it, so I decided to give it another shot.
My Quora “mini-epiphany” came yesterday when I was doing some blog reading before heading home from work and came across Frank Eliason’s blog post. Frank’s post was a deep-dive on the tool, some of the ways he’d seen people use it and discussion about Quora’s future. It was an in-depth, interesting POV, but he had me at his mention of Steve Case, former CEO of AOL, answering questions on the site: “I was very impressed by Steve’s transparency and willingness to participate,” Frank wrote.
For some reason, that story made me think back to my days at Sprint. Maybe it’s because I performed a service there inspired by what Frank did for Comcast — customer service via Twitter. When I worked at Sprint, my PR peers and I used to frequently talk about how the lines between PR, marketing, advertising and customer service were blurring. And about how customers really care about three things:
- Product quality
- Price
- Questions answered and issues resolved
No. 3 is the one that I always felt like we as communicators had the most control over. My former colleagues probably got sick of hearing me say that we’d be better off if we took a few of our people out of their current positions and assigned them to listening online to answer questions and resolve issues.
Fast forward a couple of years to this afternoon and I’m thinking: “Why couldn’t Quora be a big step toward this new job function becoming a reality?” Follow my logic:
- Customers could care less about internal company structure and silos — they just want answers now
- Corporations are beginning to transition from sales funnel to the customer journey
- Answering questions builds relationships and provides engagement opportunities
- Asking questions offers chance to crowdsource for informal market research
- Research shows once customers try a brand, if they have a great experience, they will stick around
This type of position wouldn’t be full-time for all companies, especially not at first. Culture change takes time. And it probably wouldn’t be focused solely on Quora. But Quora can be the teacher here. A place to test the behavior and see the results. How this type of job is positioned and what department takes it on would be interesting questions to answer and likely dependent on the company.
But in the end, every company has customers. Those customers have issues and questions that need answering. And some of them will be on Quora. Call it PR. Call it customer service. Call it marketing. Whatever you call it, it’s a need all companies and customers have. A need that’s worth adopting…the earlier the better. And I think Quora could be the catalyst.
- Do you see value in corporations adopting “question answerers?”
- Should companies be monitoring Quora like they do Facebook, Twitter, blogs?
- Will Quora be around 6 months from now?
A company can probably add a tag of their brand name to any questions that are related to them. They would then essentially have a community Q&A system, similar to Get Satisfaction. The thing is, anyone can answer these questions.
This is good and bad. It means that customers can help each other. It also means that inaccurate information could be shared.
I think it will be really interested when quora starts offering API's or white labels. (I don't think they are yet). You could then essentially create a Q&A feed specific to your company. Gives FAQs a kick in the pants.
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LikeDavidSpinks Imagine that, FAQs that TRULY benefit the customer. That is a great idea, DS. Could definitely see the value in companies swicthing their FAQs to that format. As far as the inaccurate answers, it's a admin resources, monitoring and a culture thing. If a company is first willing to free up the resoruces and time necessary to accurately manage Quora, then hopefully other social networks and the rest of the Web are next.
Where companies get screwed up here is they say "well, we can't appropriately staff question answering, so let's not do it at all." Wrong answer. And it's hard to show the brand-specific value if you never get a chance to play ball. Ideas like your tagging suggestion on how to organize the content, save time at first will be key to adoption. Good stuff!
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LikeAgreed, it's just common sense. To not monitor Quora and respond to topic specific questions, is just silliness. Why wouldn't you want to see what people are saying about you? This to me is no different than any other social network, we just finally have a new one worthy of discussion. Thanks for a good post, Justin.
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Likegeoffliving I'm with you Geoff. I think what we need to get everyone else on board is for companies to continue integrating a social media mindset into their internal culture. Everyone always uses Zappos as an example, and deservedly so. But as far as I can tell, the only big thing Tony and team did that others aren't doing is said: 1) Tthe customer comes first, 2) Do your job to meet the customers needs, (and the biggies) 3) If what you're doing at work now doesn't directly serve the customer, change it, 4) And then most importantly, I think through their culture, Zappos shows employees what they mean by what they say.
There's a lot of rhetoric around "serve the customer" today, but a lot less action in line with that rhetoric. Hoepfully Quora helps push the dominos over and make PR, marketing, CS really think about changing how we "have always done" our jobs and see the value in serving customers by answering their questions. Thanks for stopping by.
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