Joined Quora a week back and was fascinated by the way it is designed from questions, answers, @mentions, topics, follow, unfollow till summary of answers everything looks fascinating to me. Quora is a very thoughtfully designed Social Networking tool that kills your inquisitiveness on any given topic globally with best of the answers.
It is an online platform that aggregates questions and answers on various topics and allows people globally to collaborate on them. The beta version of Quora was founded and launched in June 2009 by Facebook’s former CTO Adam D’Angelo and was open to public by June 2010. Within 6 months of its launch Quora has become quite popular with its questions and answers feature.
On my personal use of Quora I have realized Quora = LinkedIn Questions & Answers + Twitter + Blog + Wikipedia and to justify my thoughts below mentioned are few similarities between Quora and listed tools in the title:
LinkedIn and Quora:
LinkedIn Question & Answers has been one of my favorite professional features since 3 years. Several questions I have asked and obtained response from experts of different parts of the world also have tried answering various questions related to my profession and win interesting contacts. The LinkedIn Question and Answer have tremendous potential from market research and decision making perspective but the question and answers are related to profession only. Whereas Quora is open to all sought of questions such as; sexuality, politics, profession, lifestyle etc.
LinkedIn Question and Answer feature can be rated, voted by the one who have raised the question. Rating the answers upvote, downvote in Quora is possible almost equal to the like, dislike feature of Yahoo Answers
Twitter & Quora:
The outlook of Quora is equivalent to Twitter. You can post a message to your followers which are not restricted to 140 characters. You can follow anyone you want and tag anyone in your posts almost equal to Twitter as Quora also have a @mention feature. Besides following people alone you can follow a particular topic and a question. Your Quora timeline will show the posts updated by the people, questions and topic you follow. Remember, Quora is largely based around strict guidelines in order to maintain quality, whereas with Twitter, pretty much everything goes. Twitter has terms of use, but they’re not nearly as restrictive. Twitter is about ‘freedom of expression’, you can tweet whatever you want. Quora is all about a sensible question.
Blog and Quora:
Quora is unique as you can write as much as you can. Quora is missing roughly any feature distinctive for a blog. Still, the main thing is that you can put out your thoughts, have more than 140 characters and potentially huge spectators. Few of the Quora features allows you to write, link out, insert image, edit posts, subscribing to RSS Feed, share on Twitter, share on Facebook, create search engine friendly url etc. these features are similar to a blog.
Wikipedia & Quora
Quora appears to be taking more of a Wikipedia approach that strictly reviews questions, answers posted and sternly abides by the policy. A Quora administrator actively look into every profile and ensures people follow the guidelines to maintain the profile according to standards. Irrelevant contents are flagged and removed by the administrators.
By the way, I am not sure if Marketers can do anything great here to engage its customers. But, there is definitely a lot of room for Personal Branding.
So try Quora before its too late!
Follow me on Quora on: http://www.quora.com/sorav-jain
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