Whitespace: Social Q&A - Has the next big thing arrived?

Issue 71: March 2011

In many ways the internet is a double edge sword for professionals. On one hand it connects users to a wealth of information, yet at the same time it weighs them down in layers of distracting and often useless information.

So when a new tool promises to cut through the clutter and deliver a more tailored approach to finding relevant information, the world takes note. And that's exactly what's happening right now with social Q&A.

In the near future online searching may not revolve around search terms but instead be all about asking the right questions via social Q&A applications like Quora, Yahoo! Answers, and Facebook Questions.

What is social Q&A?

Websites that connect people with questions to those with answers aren't particularly new. But social Q&A takes this process one step further by enabling users to rate or improve the quality of answers.

Quora is a trailblazer in this space. Say, for example, you wanted to know how the world's leading organisations conduct performance reviews. One approach would be trawl through search results and be greeted with a plethora of advertising dressed up as content.

But by posing the question "How does Google undertake performance reviews?" to Quora, you will either discover that this question has already been asked and answered or you'll be notified when someone responds to your query.

Conceptually speaking, you could think of social Q&A as Wikipedia's cousin. But where it's not always obvious who is tinkering with Wikipedia's content, on Quora the name and occupation of contributors is displayed before their answer to highlight areas of expertise.

Why is there a buzz around sites like Quora?

The popular tech blogger Robert Scoble recently described the 14-month-old Quora as the biggest social media development of the last 10 years. A big call when you consider that Twitter is only five years old.

The hype surrounding social Q&A isn't so much a response to what the website does, but who is using it. Time claims knowledge workers are attracted to Quora's no non-sense approach while Forbes suggests the site consistently attracts people who know what they're talking about.

Indeed, Quora members are finding some questions about organisations are being answered by CEOs; others are benefiting from the insights of people like Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and AOL founder Steve Case.

Quora may currently have a tech focus but trendspotters are predicting it will soon evoke a more mainstream appeal thanks to its ability to aggregate a large amount of highly quality, contextually ordered material into the one ad-free channel.

How can organisations use social Q&A?

Crowdsourced innovation is one area that lends itself to social Q&A. In the social media world people are often keen to help create new ideas without expecting anything in return (apart from the joy of feeling smart by posting a clever answer).

While Quora is emerging as the social Q&A site of choice for entrepreneurs, Facebook this month entered the fray with a slightly different approach, one that offers a more accessible way for brands to connect with their consumers.

Facebook Questions differs from other social Q&A sites by only accommodating questions with multiple-choice answers. By doing so the company is streamlining the Q&A process and, as a result, offering an inexpensive market research mechanism.

Possible uses include a juice bar chain asking its followers what the flavour of their week should be, retailers gauging shoppers' views of current trends, or gym chains asking members about the best times for exercise classes.

What are the pitfalls?

If you're using social Q&A sites for your own edification, there are very few downsides. But in an organisational context, it's worth covering social Q&A in your social media use guidelines to ensure staff don't naively or otherwise disclose commercially sensitive information.

It's also worth mentioning that social Q&A is in its very early days with much of the content revolving around specialist areas. But just as Twitter was once seen as a niche channel for techies, social Q&A is showing all the signs of becoming a mainstream application.

There may however be some pitfalls with regard to the use of social Q&A as a market research instrument as online polls can result in a negative response bias with unhappy customers more likely to respond to this form of market research than satisfied customers.

What's the future of social Q&A?

While the developers of Quora aren't too keen on disclosing the size of their community (it's estimated the website had over 500,000 members in January this year), the reason behind the popularity of social Q&A is obvious.

For far too long the web has been big on information and low on context. By collecting and rating answers to questions and helping users avoid marketing guff, social Q&A tools like Quora are doing the world a favour.

But a word of warning: social Q&A is potentially a highly addictive pursuit when it comes to finding answers to everything from "What should be on every CEO's bookshelf?" to "Where can I find Brisbane's best fish and chips?"

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