Questions about Quora’s usefulness for B2B companies
By Alexandra Reid
Quora’s rise to popularity is abuzz on Twitter, blogs and other media sites as a surge of people are trying out the social networking tool for the first time. Poking around the site myself this past week, my first impressions found it to be rather unintuitive. It seems that I am not alone in my opinion, as questions about how to use Quora and why it is important are being frequently asked, rather ironically, on the site itself. More importantly for my ongoing social media research for clients, I noticed that very little discussion has developed to provide insight as to why Quora is important for B2B companies and how it could be used to best effect.
First, what exactly is Quora?
Quora is “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.” Like Wikipedia, Quora is a collaborative effort, where users are meant to document the world around them. Over time, the database of knowledge should grow until almost everything that everyone wants to know is available in the system. Over the last couple of weeks, Quora’s traffic has doubled, likely making it the new “breakout site” of 2011.
