2011/01/11

How Quora COULD Get Interesting - [chrisbrogan.com]

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 01:30 AM PST

I think I finally understand Quora, the social question and answer site. The part I understand is the appeal to users. Essentially, it’s a site where you browse around for questions you think you can answer, and/or you view interesting answers.

That last part was what hooked me. I stumbled into answers by AOL’s former co-founder and CEO, Steve Case. Holy cats. All kinds of people had asked really hard questions of Steve, and he took the time to answer them, and now me, just stumbling into it, had all kinds of amazing information about the heyday, the decline, and everything in between, about AOL.

So, what would make this site amazing and interesting? Participation from more amazing and interesting people would make it stellar. But how you define “amazing” and “interesting” is left up to you. For instance, it’d be great to interview a hundred 90-year-olds about the way things used to be. It’d be interesting to interview old radio pioneers about how things were back in the boom. And it’d be thrilling to get “collections” of these interviews together for easy consumption.

Yep, I think it’s interesting. Not sure how much time I can give to it, but I’ll be fussing around in Quora a little bit longer before I write it off.

Bigger Ear Marketing for Authors

Posted: 10 Jan 2011 01:30 AM PST

Hey, published authors looking for more readers: Want to have some fun? Use FourSquare and Twitter to make a few potential new relationships happen. Here’s what I did:

I searched at search.twitter.com for the following text: “I’m at Barnes & Noble” , which came from a FourSquare check-in.
Here are the results.
I then checked the users’ Twitter profiles to see if my book would make sense to them.
I then tweeted a few people to ask if they saw my book in the marketing section.
Then, a little dialogue, because hey, it’s weird that an author is directing you around a store.

Did I sell a few thousand more books? No. But did I start a story for someone else to tell other people? Yes.

And I did it by growing bigger ears.

This isn’t a very efficient use of your time, but it was fun, and it gives you a new way to think about services like Twitter and FourSquare.