Quora for PR and Marketing Pros

Quora is a screaming new service that has exploded with the social media insiders, reporters and tech crowd. The site About describes itself as a "continually improving collection of questions and answers" created by everyone. The site has set itself apart in three ways, first written about by Louis Gray, in its community, interface (technology), and relevancy. This killer combination has top-tech journalists, bloggers and insiders spending hours posing and answering meaningful questions. For PR and marketing people, this new site is an important emerging place to monitor conversations about your company and brand.

Community

For example, Steve Case, former AOL CEO and chairman, answers business questions on the site such as "How much did it cost AOL to distribute all those CDs back in the 1990's?" That response kicked off news stories from TechCrunch, Business Insider and San Francisco Chronicle as reported by Poynter. You might be saying, "AOL is so 1997!" - Yes, but it is a fact that business leaders, CEOs and seasoned chair people are engaging on the site.

In addition to finding sources, journalists are also spending a lot of time posing and answering questions. Ben Parr from Mashable and Robert Scoble make regular comments. There is even a question on Quora about journalists that are using the service. Reporters from Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Economist, Bloomberg and Forbes top the list. It seems that there is a growing list of journalists from outside the U.S. so it is clear the community is growing beyond the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

Along with reporters, Quora has attracted the A-List of tech bloggers, Tweeps, conversationalists and creators who have the potential to influence the conversation.

Relevancy

The big buzz word in social media is relevancy and Quora seems to have more than its quota. Relevancy is auto-magically presenting what you want to see when you want to see it. Or, even better, the finding it for me before I know I want it. Quora seems to deliver something new and interesting to me each time I visit. As with any new database of information, critical mass is well, critical. I'm throwing questions at it about PR, social media and Silicon Valley and it does pretty well. It will need to continue to expand its reach to appeal to those who are outside that small world. One more word about relevancy, I'm seeing Quora results showing up in Google searches. If Google is pouring some of its juice on Quora, that means that posts about your company (positive and negative) will appear prominently in search results.

Interface

Like any good next generation idea, Quora has mastered several of the factors that make it easy to use, follow and contribute. With your permission, Quora automatically follows all of your Facebook friends and Twitter followers. This feature probably helped it to rapidly grow with minimal user input.

The social media world sometimes seems like a rapidly expanding foam filling every crack and crevice of our lives. I'm sure much of it is as empty as foam, but Quora has something a bit different. As a PR professional, I'd check it out and include it in your monitoring. They have got a lot of stuff right and a lot of the right people are at Quora right now.

Because of the explosion of interest in Quora, there are several blog posts that I'd recommend from PR people who are approaching the service from the same angle:

• 6 ways journalists can use Quora as tool to report, share ideas, Mallary Jean Tenore, Poynter.org, Jan. 12, 2011
  

• The big Quora question: What’s it good for?, Matt Wilson, Ragan.com, Jan. 14, 2011
• Quora and How to Become the ‘Next Big Thing’, Rob Brown, prandtheweb.com, Jan. 5, 2011
• What future does Quora hold for PR and marketing: Three ways you should use it more, and three new areas of innovation, Drew Benvie, Jan. 4, 2011
• Five ways Quora will impact PRs in 2011, Eb Adeyeri, LewisPR.com, Jan. 4, 2011
  

My own Quora profile can be found here. If you have other posts on this topic, please add them to the comments.

Marketing in the Feed

The new dream of the marketing professional is to reach their customers within feed. The feed is that stream of status updates, shared photos and videos that people see when they log into Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed or any of the other 50 social networks. That feed is special because people place a higher value or trust in information that comes from their friends. There are several easy tactics that marketing professionals can use to allow fans and supporters to share their cause with their friends.

At a basic level, that feed is generated when a person reads a New York Times article that interests them and they think that others will like it too. They then share that information into a social network using links on the page that quickly email or post that information on another Web site. For example, I love to read the NY Times Most Emailed stories because they are often the best of the paper. Something of unique value is created when you track what people are willing to send to their friends.

Younger generations seem to be getting much or all of their current events through the feed. They learn of Michael Jackson's death or the launch of a new phone through information shared from their friends or a list of people they follow. They may never open the New York Times paper (or go to the Web site), but may read several stories a day when people they follow give their take on the story.

How can marketeers engage with their publics and customers in the feed?

1. Make all content shareable.

Each page, video, photo, press release, whitepaper or piece of content should have a universal sharing menu that allows people to push that information with their friends. There are several free tools that do all the hard work for you. I don't have any reliable stats, but people see roughly 10 percent more page views by simply adding a sharing menu to plain content. Stuff that is hot (like videos) will see much sharper increases in views as fans pass it along.

2. Generate lots of media so your customers can share it.

If you interview a customer, think about how you can turn that single interview into multiple pieces of content. Instead of just interviewing them and taking notes, record it on video, audio and take photos. You can quickly turn that traditional printed customer case study into a one minute video testimonial, audio podcast and photo slide show. This aproach has a multiplying effect on your marketing efforts and will generate a high volume of earned placements from your customers.

For example, I worked for an agriculture technology company that outfitted much of its sales teams with low-cost video camcorders (most used their own home handhelds). Every time they went to a customer's farm, they shot video of the customers using the product. The videos were grainy and shaky, but prospective customers loved them. The amateur video was more credible to them and gave them the "test drive" they needed before buying. Once the amateur clips are uploaded to YouTube, everyone can easily share them and find them on their own. When the videos were embedded into the company's website, those videos received more clicks than anything else on the website and turned into real money for the sales team.

3. Monitor the feed and engage quickly. Hire a community manager.

If you are inviting your customers to share content, you have to listen to them and quickly respond. As the community manager for a software company, I set a goal to successfully close nearly all online conversations within 24 hours. This drove the community engagment team to quickly find and resolve any concerns that arose. Customers and prospective customers always knew that we'd be there to help them and often directed us to conversations that needed our insight. Good community managers are a combination of customer support and public relations people. They must feel free to comment on behalf of the company instantly and know the service well enough to resolve the problem.

4. Identify people with a large following. Engage them early.

Community managers quickly learn who has a large voice or strong following. Since the era of the pitchman, people have sought out those with influence. In feed marketing era, the influence map has shifted dramatically. A single person can have 900,000 followers on Twitter. That influence radius dwarfs the daily readership of all but the largest print journalists.

I recently worked on a campaign with a startup company where a news article about their newly launched service was ReTweeted by a handful of people who had a very large Twitter and Friendfeed following. Within 30 minutes, that story was pushed out to over 600,000 followers. The client saw a sharp spike in Web site traffic from the Tweets that far exceeded the referral traffic it received from the many traditional media stories. In addition to customers, that Tweet appeared in the feed of much of their target stakeholders providing them with critical third-party validation during their launch.

Marketing in the feed is governed by the same brand building strategies. The rules of earning someone's trust and engaging with stakeholders remain constant. The realtime pace and transparency inherent in the feed do require some changes in tactics to help your customers share your good news and respond to their enthusiasm.

Friendly disclosure: I work at a PR agency that represents several social media companies. One of those companies makes tools that allow you to share content online.