Twitter and Facebook hog the social media spotlight. But beyond the social giants, there’s a smaller player: the question-and-answer site Quora, an increasingly useful resource for business innovators.
Following the introduction of its iPhone app, this week Quora launched a new credit system, incentivizing contributions to further streamline the flow of the site’s queries and responses. It adds a game-like layer to Quora, awarding those who write popular answers with credits they can spend on requesting expert answers to their own questions.
For the growing number of businesspeople who follow industry discussions on Quora, the newly portable network is like having a brain trust in your pocket, ready with a stream of useful answers to current business issues.
Visit Quora.com for the first time, and you’re greeted with a relatively plain introduction: “Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited and organized by everyone who uses it.” You might be forgiven for surfing away from that bland greeting, having been burned in the past by lower-quality Q&A sites. (Remember Yahoo Answers?)
“It’s like a next-generation Wikipedia, with real experts answering questions,” explains Web developer Mircea Goia on a Quora.com answer page.
Semil Shah, who has written more than 500 answers on Quora, describes it as “the default place to ask the questions that you can’t find the answers for.”
Given that it’s a knowledge-sharing community, you may wonder how the site will draw revenue. The new site-specific currency system seems a possible first step in the direction of enabling users to pay, not just in credits but in real money, for valuable answers, and potentially for marketers to sponsor particular discussions.
Quora’s growing value surfaces when you punch in a search term and land on a topic relevant to your work. If you’re in the entertainment industry, you could start by reading industry experts’ answers about the percentage of total box office receipts American films earn overseas. The best answers bubble up to the top of each page after earning dozens or even hundreds of positive ratings. They tend to be specific, detailed, fact-based and well-sourced.
If you’re starting work in the Asia-Pacific region, you’ll be glad to read local experts’ answers to a question about the most reliable regional business publications. If you’re wondering about which software works best for a particular business task, or about the various marketing strategies employed in a specific consumer category, you can dig into a summary of curated insights from industry insiders and come away with actionable info.
There’s a rich reservoir of historical business info on Quora. Where else could you learn from former AOL CEO Steve Case and one of its former top marketers that at the peak of the dial-up era, 50 percent of all CDs manufactured had AOL’s logo splashed on them, or that the CD mailing campaign cost more than $300 million?
Questions about e-commerce have sparked terrific recent answers about online business trends. Elizabeth Knopf, an entrepreneur and venture capital veteran, earned nearly 300 thumbs-up this week for an exhaustive, thoughtful, fact-filled explanation of why VCs are now eager to fund e-commerce startups. Matthew Carroll, a serial entrepreneur, picked up a similar number of raves recently for an answer he worked on for three months: a comprehensive assessment, with detailed financials, addressing the next wave of e-commerce opportunities.
In explaining how Quora surpasses Wikipedia’s value, theorist Seb Paquet suggests that unlike Wikipedia, “Quora is not past-bound. It is future-oriented … You can throw one hypothesis or another out there, and see if it will withstand the test of examination by other minds … Start-up people can use it as an early indicator of whether a problem is worth trying to solve. Quora is a creative community in a radically different sense than Wikipedia.”
Like Facebook and Twitter, Quora can become a time-sucking rabbit hole. After a long workday, you may log in to research the market potential of a new e-commerce startup and end up reading oddball answers to provocative questions that are completely unrelated to your work. Like this one: “Why is it in our society that an actor pretending to be a police officer in a movie makes millions of dollars more than an actual police officer who puts his life on the line every day?”
Quora may not have LinkedIn-esque IPO potential, nor does it attract the buzz of Google+ or YouTube. But assuming you can steer clear of its alluring but unproductive fringes, the Quorasphere offers a business information repository more thorough than any social Web alternative.
Following the introduction of its iPhone app, this week Quora launched a new credit system, incentivizing contributions to further streamline the flow of the site’s queries and responses. It adds a game-like layer to Quora, awarding those who write popular answers with credits they can spend on requesting expert answers to their own questions.
For the growing number of businesspeople who follow industry discussions on Quora, the newly portable network is like having a brain trust in your pocket, ready with a stream of useful answers to current business issues.
Visit Quora.com for the first time, and you’re greeted with a relatively plain introduction: “Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited and organized by everyone who uses it.” You might be forgiven for surfing away from that bland greeting, having been burned in the past by lower-quality Q&A sites. (Remember Yahoo Answers?)
“It’s like a next-generation Wikipedia, with real experts answering questions,” explains Web developer Mircea Goia on a Quora.com answer page.
Semil Shah, who has written more than 500 answers on Quora, describes it as “the default place to ask the questions that you can’t find the answers for.”
Given that it’s a knowledge-sharing community, you may wonder how the site will draw revenue. The new site-specific currency system seems a possible first step in the direction of enabling users to pay, not just in credits but in real money, for valuable answers, and potentially for marketers to sponsor particular discussions.
Quora’s growing value surfaces when you punch in a search term and land on a topic relevant to your work. If you’re in the entertainment industry, you could start by reading industry experts’ answers about the percentage of total box office receipts American films earn overseas. The best answers bubble up to the top of each page after earning dozens or even hundreds of positive ratings. They tend to be specific, detailed, fact-based and well-sourced.
If you’re starting work in the Asia-Pacific region, you’ll be glad to read local experts’ answers to a question about the most reliable regional business publications. If you’re wondering about which software works best for a particular business task, or about the various marketing strategies employed in a specific consumer category, you can dig into a summary of curated insights from industry insiders and come away with actionable info.
There’s a rich reservoir of historical business info on Quora. Where else could you learn from former AOL CEO Steve Case and one of its former top marketers that at the peak of the dial-up era, 50 percent of all CDs manufactured had AOL’s logo splashed on them, or that the CD mailing campaign cost more than $300 million?
Questions about e-commerce have sparked terrific recent answers about online business trends. Elizabeth Knopf, an entrepreneur and venture capital veteran, earned nearly 300 thumbs-up this week for an exhaustive, thoughtful, fact-filled explanation of why VCs are now eager to fund e-commerce startups. Matthew Carroll, a serial entrepreneur, picked up a similar number of raves recently for an answer he worked on for three months: a comprehensive assessment, with detailed financials, addressing the next wave of e-commerce opportunities.
In explaining how Quora surpasses Wikipedia’s value, theorist Seb Paquet suggests that unlike Wikipedia, “Quora is not past-bound. It is future-oriented … You can throw one hypothesis or another out there, and see if it will withstand the test of examination by other minds … Start-up people can use it as an early indicator of whether a problem is worth trying to solve. Quora is a creative community in a radically different sense than Wikipedia.”
Like Facebook and Twitter, Quora can become a time-sucking rabbit hole. After a long workday, you may log in to research the market potential of a new e-commerce startup and end up reading oddball answers to provocative questions that are completely unrelated to your work. Like this one: “Why is it in our society that an actor pretending to be a police officer in a movie makes millions of dollars more than an actual police officer who puts his life on the line every day?”
Quora may not have LinkedIn-esque IPO potential, nor does it attract the buzz of Google+ or YouTube. But assuming you can steer clear of its alluring but unproductive fringes, the Quorasphere offers a business information repository more thorough than any social Web alternative.
