Quora – Social Media’s Latest Darling

While MySpace pushes its redesign and Facebook flaunts mobile enhancements, there’s a new social site getting buzz – Quora.com. The site consists of a collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by users. To get started, sign-up using your Facebook or Twitter account and then you’re free to ask or answer any question. Integration with your social network enables you to see which of your friends are on Quora and determine their influence/expertise. You can follow people and topics you’re interested in and opt to include a bio about your topic expertise to increase your influence. Similar topics are grouped to create one deep resource where updates are unified, but prior versions remain preserved for background.

Sounds like a lot of other social Q&A sites out there like Yahoo Answers, Answers.com and Google’s Ardvark, right? Well, not quite. What’s capturing the media’s attention and driving people to Quora in droves is the quality of users participating in the conversations. For example, Forbes recently highlighted a C-suite example of Netflix chief executive, Reed Hastings, answering the question “How much does Netflix spend on postage each year?”

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How can you leverage Quora? At a bare minimum it should be added to your monitoring process and look for opportunities to have a brand expert enter the discussion and add value to the response. Quora can also be a valuable resource for identifying media and influencer targets and to follow their questions/responses and uncover media opportunities as they are emerging.