How-Tos

Using Quora for Personal and Business Benefit

February 10, 2011 by Kari Rippetoe

I joined Quora and have been using it for a couple of months, after seeing all the buzz about it on Twitter in recent months (and since it’s my job to know about these things). Now, you might be thinking “ANOTHER social network? How am I going to keep track of this? And what use could this possibly be to me?” I don’t blame you for thinking this, because I thought the same thing at first. It seems like there’s a new social networking site every week, with claims from all over the social mediasphere about how it’s “the next big thing in social media.” It can get a bit tiresome, ya know?

Now that I’ve had the opportunity to evaluate Quora, I want to give you my initial thoughts, as well as provide a few opportunities and uses for Quora for businesses.

What is Quora, anyway?

My first thought when I started using Quora was Oh, this is like a cross between Twitter and LinkedIn Answers with some Wikipedia thrown in. You create a profile, “follow” some topics (and people) in which you’re interested, and post your own questions and/or answers to other questions. People can vote your answers up or down, comment on them, thank you for an answer, and even mark it as unhelpful (which essentially buries your answer). You can also follow individual questions within a topic to be alerted of answers that are added. So, there’s a lot of following going on.

The Wikipedia-esque part comes in the ability for people to edit your answers. Well, you can “suggest” edits to the original poster that they can choose to accept. This is where I’m slightly confused, though. Why would you suggest edits to someone else’s answer? It’s their answer – why not leave a comment, or post your own answer? Maybe there’s something glaringly incorrect about their answer, and rather than publicly call them out on it, you choose to suggest the correction. To me, though, this seems rather nit-picky. Am I wrong here?

That’s great, but how can I use Quora?

I hear ya. You don’t want to join yet another social network without knowing what you could possibly get out of it – both personally and business-wise. Let’s go through a few of these uses and opportunities:

Building Thought-Leadership: Follow topics in which you have some expertise and answer questions in those topics. Provide well thought-out answers that will help to position you as a go-to expert on that topic. You also have the ability to describe your experience on a particular topic, which people see when you post an answer within that topic.

Content Marketing: The questions and answers you post on Quora can be great fodder for other content – like blog posts, for instance. Use your questions for a specific topic as the basis for a blog post to get your readers thinking about answers. Or, create a blog post from your answer (and the answers of others) to someone else’s question. And hey – you can even connect your WordPress or Tumblr blog to Quora to make this easier!

By the way, Quora has a cool feature that gives you the ability to tweet a link to your answer to a question. This is great for cross-promotion between platforms, although I wish you could also post to your LinkedIn profile (makes sense, doesn’t it?).

Research: Quora covers a wide array of topics, so it’s dead easy to find a wealth of information on whatever you might be looking for. If you still can’t answer your question from what’s already there, post it and crowdsource answers!

Brand & Industry Monitoring: Run a search for an industry topic (like “Mobile Broadband”) or a brand (like “Verizon”) – the results are a treasure trove of information to help you gauge industry hot topics and customer pain points. It’s a great way to listen and participate in the discussions going on – both for thought-leadership and for customer support.

Expanding Your Network: Sure, there are loads of people from my existing networks that I’m following and who are following me on Quora; but I’ve managed to find lots of new people as well through mutually-followed topics and questions. These are incredibly smart people who I consider to be top of their game and post some really helpful answers to questions.

Are you using Quora? How have you found it useful (or not, even)? Tell us your opinion!

Doing More with Less: Digital Communications for Business Development

December 21, 2010 by Mitch Arnowitz

Last week, I attended and spoke at the British Consulate’s IPA Forum in New York City. Participants were economic development agency representatives from European countries. These folks are charged with creating business and jobs in their resspective countries – business that is generated by US-based companies.

The theme of the morning was doing more with less in a global recession. In my presentation entitled The New Biz Dev, I spoke about leveraging the digital environment for business development purposes. My remarks focused on tips, tools and low-cost ideas for utilizing digital communications (including social networking).

The thread running through my talk was that the Internet can be used to build long-lasting relationships and save money. I cautioned folks, however, that “resources” include time and money and building relationships takes time!

I touched upon using hosted solutions for relationship building efforts. Whether its an ASP for an e-mail campaign or document sharing for collaboration, hosted solutions is the way to go. Ease of use, cost and reliability are only a few reasons that our shop rarely licenses software these days.

The New Biz Dev – IPA Forum from Tuvel Communications

We also discussed customer service and how social networking solicits feedback, saves money and builds relationships. We mentioned Salesforce and MailChimp as examples of customer relationship management tools that are integrating social media into sales efforts and marketing campaigns.

Much of Tuvel’s outreach efforts include hanging out where our customers and prospects are – on their turf. We talked about making it easy for you and your company to be found and to do business with you, but I also discussed the importance of finding where your customers are online (even asking them directly through surveys and customer communications – two-way conversations). I emphasized the importance of developing and nurturing a permission-based house file rather than renting e-mail lists.

We had a fun discussion about contests and promotions, trying to impress upon attendees that all people like to have fun – whether they come from business to business, government to citizen or business to consumer sectors.

We developed a nice list of low cost tools that you can use for listening, creating content and sharing. You can find it here:

The New Biz Dev: Useful Tools from Tuvel Communications

How to Create On-Site Event Buzz Through Social Media

November 16, 2010 by Kari Rippetoe

We’ve created, launched and managed social media campaigns and presences for a variety of events, and that includes on-site social media engagement. We definitely have a number of tried-and-true tactics for creating buzz and interest during an event through social media, and I’d like to share some of those with you here.

Live tweet sessions. By tweeting bite-sized, but pertinent, pieces of information from sessions, workshops and keynotes, you’re providing value to those in attendance and those outside the event who are watching the Twitter stream. Interest and buzz is generated from retweets.

Tips: It’s important that people watching your tweets know the source of the information in your live session tweets, so be sure to include the speaker’s name (usually their last name for brevity). Better yet, include their Twitter handle if they have one. Photos of speakers or panels are great session-tweeting fodder as well. Jeff Hurt has a great post on tweeting at conferences and events, which has excellent pointers and is definitely worth a read.

Retweet others. Your attendees are the most important part of your event – and your best source for relevant, insightful information as it happens. They’re tweeting about what is important to them, and retweeting that information puts them front and center and gets them more involved in the event as a whole.

Tip: Thank your Twittering attendees for their insights with @ reply “Thank you” notes.

Post photos & video. Don’t just tell people what’s going on; show them by posting photos and videos straight from the event to your outposts (including your event blog). Post clips from keynotes and sessions, photos of popular speakers and products, on-the-spot video interviews with attendees – be creative!

Better yet…

Encourage attendees to post content to outposts from the event. Create a hub on Facebook or Flickr for attendees to share their own event experiences through videos and photos. Promote it through the event website and on-site signage and print materials, or even build it into an event-specific mobile app. Encourage people to tag them with your event name and hashtag for maximum exposure.

Ask questions to encourage conversation and feedback. Ask people to share their feedback of the event through your outposts, or even create quick polls and surveys using Twtpoll or SurveyMonkey.

Tip: Try using Google Moderator to gather feedback as well.

Create content that involves your attendees. I love Paper.li, and I’ve discovered that what they offer is perfect for events. It’s a great way to feature your attendees and the content that matters to them. If you gather Twitter account IDs from your attendees when they register, create a Twitter list and add them – then create a daily with Paper.li from that list.

Tip: Create similar dailies from lists of your speakers and exhibitors.

Get exhibitors involved. The expo floor can be a great source of excitement, so work through social media to build relationships between attendees and exhibitors. Bring groups together through Tweetups and demos at booths. Post photos of cool displays and swag giveaways.

Tip: Create an expo floor scavenger hunt using location-based services like Foursquare or Gowalla, or event-friendly location-based services like Scvngr or Double Dutch.

Plan & hold mini-meetups & tweetups. These don’t have to be large, extravagent, intricately-planned shindigs at expensive venues with open bars and free food. Why not have mini-meetups and tweetups, planned and promoted ahead of time and taking place at a designated spot at the event, but held only for the purpose of getting people together to meet and converse. Maybe offer some freebies, hold a special giveaway or make it into a meet-and-greet for a speaker or esteemed guest – but it doesn’t have to be more than that.

Tip: Suzanne Carawan tweeted an excellent idea for an on-site meetup that I wanted to include: