Posts Tagged ‘SMM’

Quora Quora!

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Do you use Quora? Should you use Quora? In the last couple of weeks, Quora has become the trendy pick as a breakout site for 2011. Traffic increased tremendously in December but then more than doubled again in early January, as per information released on Quora couple of weeks ago.

What’s the noise all about?

Quora is an online knowledge market, founded in June 2009, launched in private beta in January 2010, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Quora aggregates questions and answers on many topics and allows users to collaborate on them.

Quora’s service allows users to ask questions and give answers. Additionally, users can comment on the questions and answers and “upvote” or “downvote” the answers. An “Answer Summary” can be created to reflect the consensus of the community. This summary is a wiki that can be edited by any registered user. Recently a blogging feature called Quora Posts has also been added.

Upvote and Downvote Option

Who is behind the noise?

Co-founded by Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s former CTO) and Charlie Cheever, it received funding from Benchmark Capital in March 2010, valuing the start-up at a rumored $86 million. Matt Cohler, a former Facebook executive, has taken a board seat at the company.

Co-founder Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever

Why so much of noise?

On December 26, 2010, Robert Scoble, a technology evangelist who earlier was at Microsoft and is known for his prominent blog Scobleizer, blogged ‘Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?’ This effectively endorsed the site as the next big thing.  PC Magazine, Techcrunch, TNW and FastCompany were amongst the many media outlets that quickly followed.  This, coupled with social graph on-boarding with Twitter, Facebook and email integration, lead to truly viral growth.

Pegged as a reverse blogging site rather than a simple Q&A site, Quora is trying hard to establish itself as an alternate to Yahoo Answers. According to the co-founders of the site, Quora is canvas waiting to be painted upon. “When you come to a question page on Quora and it’s blank there are a bunch of people waiting for the answer. An expert will look at it and say there’s an audience here and I know exactly what they want to hear. And I actually know about this stuff, or know enough to research and produce a really interesting piece of content, and it’s going to go to the perfectly targeted audience who opted in to hearing about this.”

What seems to be giving Quora the edge over other sites is the fact that each response has to be supplemented with the user’s real identity. This makes the answers that more authentic and believable. People say they feel smarter after they use Quora.

The magic of revealing the identity lies in something about the quality of the people and the content. Real discussions break out on Quora all the time. The signal to noise ratio is extremely high. Quora is a great place to find answers about products from prominent people involved with them. It’s also a great place for those prominent people to disagree, publicly. And this gives it a clear advantage of being live and buzzing.

How is the noise being created?

Quora is solving the problem that Google’s been trying to solve forever – creating the database of intentions. The most important thing about searching is to have a properly framed search string that will lead the searcher to the desired result.

In most of the cases, this perfect question has already been framed and been answered. All one needs to do is find it. And that is exactly what Quora is doing. This cuts out the link web that google provides for a query, or avoid the mindless answers people post on Yahoo answer. And unlike Linkedin, where you may get a great answer, you are not restricted to how many questions you can ask or look for.

Has Quora found a voice in India?

Not yet. Though according to Google AdPlanner, Quora has 30,000 unique monthly users in India — around 8% of total Quora users. Most people who use Quora in India are just beginning to get a feel of how this unique platform works. But make no mistake, going by the rate at which Scribd became the place to research for information in India, Quora will soon be amongst the most popular research site. Just for reference, while researching for this article we came across this question on Quora: “What are the key differences in economic policy of China and India?” which had two responses. Suffice to say, this is a great starting point for any researcher.

Finding its footing in India

Quora could do to Google and Yahoo Answers what Facebook did to Orkut and MySpace, make Q&A sites more social and fun. Whether the noise and excitement survives post the initial euphoria will have to be seen. It’s early days but the concept could do well if the quality of the answers remains high and spam remains low.

To read more on Question and Answer site, check our previous post.

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Posted in Social Media, Social Media Research, Target Audience | No Comments »

Answers to a successful Online Brand Relation

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

In today’s fast paced world, virtual social networking has always strengthened existing relationships, and continues to provide a foundation for border-less communities based on common areas of interest.

Some people like to share with others what they know. Some people like to learn by reading questions and answers. Q&A sites offer that kind of information from experts or from everyday people. Q&A sites have grown immensely in the last few years. People are, more than ever, turning to the internet to get quick information about any topic through these Q&A sites.

It’s kind of asking your neighbour, coworker or friend a question and getting a written answer. There are some questions that cannot be answered by even the best reference books or encyclopedias. They need a human expert that can understand a complex relationship.

Opportunity for Brands to be Human.

This provides a great opportunity for Brands to participate in conversation with people who are looking for information about products they manufacture or services they provide. Q&A sites work great for this, because people are already asking the questions.

Brands are driving leads using Question and Answer forums like LinkedIn Answers, Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com. LinkedIn Answers dominates the category usage, claiming 59.2 percent of use for companies participating in at least one Q&A forum. Yahoo! Answers is a distant second at 37.1 percent.

(Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com)

Providing quality answers and links to relevant pages can help Brands in the following ways:

  • Direct customers (and potential customers) to accurate information about your product.
  • Connect with people in the market, build reputation, and generate leads.
  • Provide links back to your site. Some of these links are Follow links, and thus also provide SEO value.

Also, the Internet has a reputation for being shady. You need to let readers know why your answer is reputable and why you’re the right person to answer it. This gives Brands a greater credence and integrity to the response, and a higher likelihood for a recommendation or a vote up. It is this process of informing and educating the general audience that can help the brand establish “Thought Leadership.”

Who is listening to the Brand?

In a recent Business.com study, 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites. Only 29% said they use Twitter to find business-related information. Among those who use Q&A forums, 92 percent say they are at least somewhat useful with 25 percent claiming them to be “very useful.”

(Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com)

How do Brands use these sites?

The general rules of social media apply here too:

  1. Help others
  2. Build relationships
  3. Push your products and services while answering somebody’s question or request.

In Q&A sites, the starting point is that somebody asked the question that you’re answering.

Specifically you shoul:

  • Search the Q&A sites for questions about your subject, and browse the relevant categories.
  • Answer questions fairly and accurately. If appropriate, mention your product or service, and / or link to a relevant page on your site.
  • Follow up & interact where appropriate. Use these sites’ message boards to see if you can be of further help, or to congratulate another contributor for a great answer.

Fill in your User Profile, showing why people should like and trust you. You can also usually link to your site from your User Profile.

In essence, the best practices is to be helpful first, don’t go in trumpeting your sales pitch and focus on long-term relationship building and benefits rather than seeing a sudden influx of leads. An answer should simply touch on all prominent points that deliver a comprehensive, well structured response to a question.

The best part of the Q&A sites is that, they are Search Engine Optimized. This helps in increasing the visibility of the brand. More importantly, it is a credible way of highlighting your product range without sounding like advertising. And finally, Q&A sites are helping Brands become more human. It has allowed a Brand to be the friend you turn to when you have a query. Objective Achieved!

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Posted in Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Target Audience, Windchimes Comm | 5 Comments »

Twitter to roll out official Analytics

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

With Twitter almost ready to launch its analytics service by the end of the year, the market is already abuzz about the impact it will have on the Social Media Marketing scene.

The social networking giant recently announced that it has roped in a select group of users to carry out the testing of the product. It is believed that as of now, Twitter will be keeping this product, free of cost for its 197 million users.

With Social Media Marketing gaining a substantial space in the overall marketing mix, such a tool, which can give insights to a brand’s online efforts will be of great benefit. Not only will it help in deriving the results of a campaign, it will also, and more importantly, help in realigning the SMM campaign.

Tracking the Campaign

Since its launch, Twitter has seen almost every brand using it for promotion activity. Simple #tag contests and customer support have become major online activities. Brands like Starbucks, Dell Computers and Ford motors have thousands of followers on line. Closer home, brands like MTV, NDTV and Kingfisher have successfully engaged thousands of people in the most entertaining manner.

But till now, all the brands were either clueless about where there campaign or SMM efforts were heading or they were paying huge sum of money for getting insights through third party vendors. With the launch of Twitter Analytics, that too, free of cost that is all set to change.

Now, the brands will know exactly which of their tweets has helped them get more followers. Which tweet has caused disgruntle and what topics gets the maximum retweets. Not only that, with analytics available, online reputation management also becomes easier.


At a glance

With the new tool, Brands will have data such as 6-hour bar graph to show mentions, follows, unfollows and retweets that the campaign has generated. Also, it allows you to categories and filter tweets into different groups such as “best,” “good” and ”all.”


The Impact

It is surprising that something that can help Brands so much should be offered at no cost. The rationale behind this seems to be that businesses are more likely to stick with Twitter if detailed statistics are made available to every user, helping them measure and improve upon the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and justify the effort needed to continually update a Twitter feed.

Also, though tracking social media is big business, the news that Twitter is set to enter the ring with a free product of its own may come as a bad news for third party providers.

It would be worth noting that while brands may not be able to make an exact impact on the sales figure through the tool, it will surely help them in becoming more in sync with their audience.

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Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »