It's hard to faithfully convey "fast" in a picture, so here's a picture of fast food. Credit: SteFou

Today I’d like to talk about a new little feature that I think you all will find very useful.  Until now, we have sent you (the webmasters) daily digests of Q&A on your sites, giving you a nice summary of the activity, but we heard from some of you that you wanted to know FASTER when your visitors had questions so you could get to them right away.

So, today we launched instant question notifications!  To turn these on, just sign in to Degree3, go to your Dashboard, and click on the new “Notifications” link under your site’s name.  Here you can control both your daily digests and your instant question notifications.

As always, keep those suggestions coming – we’re working to make Degree3 a better service for you!

I'm so busy being social, I don't have time to put down my gun. Photo credit: Nigel

Nic Brisbourne recently posted on The Equity Kicker about “social saturation,” a concept put forth by the Forrester Research CEO George Colony to describe his finding that people are running out of time to give to social applications and software.  That’s right, the time that we spend checking Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Google+ may be close to peaking.  Social consumes such a huge chunk of our available time that we just can’t spare any more.

Colony went on to propose that in order for social applications to continue to grow in importance and relevance, they must become more useful and less of a diversion; they must help you solve problems rather than help you waste time.

This social saturation has some interesting implications for the large social players and Facebook in particular.  If we’re socially saturated (at least here in the US), our usage of Facebook is unlikely to grow much and Facebook will have to work harder to maintain their revenue growth.  They will surely optimize their ad platform further, put more emphasis on Facebook Credits, and will try more new monetization techniques as they strive to make the most of a market that they already own.

Look both ways before texting. Photo credit: Ed Yourdon

That said, Facebook is still expanding its reach in emerging markets, so even if their share of attention in the US is plateauing, they have plenty of room to grow globally.

Whether or not we’re really at our peak usage of social apps, we here at D3 wholeheartedly agree with the conclusion that social needs to be more focused on solving people’s problems, and this applies to everyone who builds or runs a website.  This means YOU.

When you’re creating a social strategy for your site, focus on how your social elements can help your visitors, not how they can help you.  Can they inform your visitors, solve their problems, or (of course) answer their questions?

To get started, think about how your site can do any of the following, and how social could enhance these efforts:

• Educate people (e.g. Skillshare, Youtube Education)
• Solve people’s problems (StackOverflow, Yahoo Answers)
• Connect people with people who can help them (Quora, LinkedIn)
• Connect people in real life (Meetup)
• Entertain people (Zynga, Spotify, Turntable.fm, Netflix)
• Save people money (Livingsocial, woot, Amazon)
• Help people keep in touch with those they care about (Facebook, Google+)

The sites I listed have become popular (at least in part) because of their ability to integrate social elements to improve people’s lives.  If you can use social tools to give even one of these benefits to your visitors, you’ll be way ahead of your competition.  For the social companies out there that do not help people in one of these ways…their days are numbered if they can’t adapt and provide real value.  (Twitter is notably missing from this list.  With its myriad use cases, it can help in several/all of these categories, as can Facebook.)

Naturally, we believe Q&A is a perfect way to add social interaction to your site, to help your visitors, and to help them help each other.  It can educate, solve problems, connect people, save them money, and sometimes even entertain!  The most important point to remember is that if you are helping your visitors with your site’s content, tools, and social elements, they will reward you for it, either through subscriptions, purchases, or ad revenue.

We’d love to talk more with you about using Q&A to help your visitors, so drop us a line!

Thanks for the thank!

The holidays are almost here, and as we get ready to relax a little with family and friends, we have some feature updates for you!  Sorry, they’re not gift-wrapped, but hopefully you won’t mind.

• You can now set your intro text within the popup window!   Just go to your Dashboard and click “Settings” to update this.
• We have added social sharing buttons to the plugin, so visitors can share your Q&A on Facebook, Twitter, or via email!
• Easier to fully modify the CSS styles of the in-page Q&A module so it matches your site
• New layout options: tab AND module, and “none” – create your own Q&A button! (See “Layout” section.)
• Person information bubbles – if you hover your mouse over any person’s name within the Degree3 popup, you’ll see a balloon pop up with their stats, so you can see how many questions they’ve answered, and how many thanks they’ve received!
• Various UI improvements: the UI is cleaner now and has more contextual tools (tools that only appear when you need them.)  We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on these!

Yawn... don't rely on contact forms for pre-sales!

Social Q&A has a variety of applications, but small businesses have their own unique set of challenges, so I thought I’d spend a little time talking about how social Q&A can help small businesses create and maintain relationships with their customers, so those customers are more likely to complete a sale and then keep coming back when they need support or new products or services.

(Not sure what social Q&A is?  See my last post here.)

Pre-Sales

As a small business, you’re probably not thinking about creating a “community” on your site; you’re interested in marketing your products or services, and you’re interested in making sales.

So to help you make sales, let’s first look at the typical customer decision-making process.  It goes roughly like this (I’ll use the word “widget” here in the classical sense, representing a product or service that you offer.):

1. Problem recognition (“Hey, I think I need to buy a widget!”)
2. Information search (“What kind of widgets are available?” 36% of consumers do research on a company’s website before buying, so you need to be ready for them.)
3. Evaluation of alternatives (“What kind of widget is best for me?”)
4. Decision Implementation (“Here’s some money for that blue widget in the corner.”)
5. Post-purchase evaluation (“Is this really the right widget for me?”)

In the pre-sales phase, you are reaching the customer while they’re in Steps 1-3.   The customer may not even know that they need the widget yet, so you may need to first convince them of why they need it, show them what widgets you have available, and show them how your widgets are better than that other guy’s widgets, all BEFORE they can get to Step 4 and actually BUY your widget.

That’s a lot of convincing, and you have very little time before the customer gets bored and moves on!

This is where Q&A comes in.  No matter how comprehensive your site is, these customers WILL have questions that your site doesn’t answer.  Don’t lose these customers!  Give them an easy way to ask you questions directly about your products or services, right there on the page they are on.  Do not rely on contact forms or email, because these feel “faceless” to visitors, and they often won’t bother contacting you because they’re not sure if they’ll get an answer.

With Q&A, your customers can see that you are available and eager to answer their questions, and this puts you in a very positive light in their consumer’s eyes.  Would they rather buy this service from the woman who’s actively answering her visitors’ questions on Site A, or the guy who has a “Contact me” form on Site B?   I know which one I’d choose.

Customer service is the name of the game these days; if people think you’re attentive and looking to help them, you give them confidence in their purchasing decision, and they’re more likely to buy from you.  And that leads us to the next phase of the purchase:

Post-Sales

So your customer has now purchased something from you and they have questions for you about how to use it, how to maintain it, or about additional services that they might require.  They may call or email you directly, but…they may not.  They are likely to look at your site, especially if it helped them get answers in the pre-sales phase, and again Q&A can help:

You want people to ask their questions on your site first. If they don’t, what are the alternatives?

• They ask on a forum somewhere
• They ask a friend
• They ask on a competitor’s site
• They don’t ask and just stop using your product/service

Of course none of these options are good for your potential of making a new sale or maintaining a positive brand image.  You want to have the first opportunity to give a good answer to your customers, so they feel confident in you and your products or services, and because they already saw that you have Q&A before they bought, they know that they can get support directly on your site.

It’s MUCH cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one (the numbers vary by industry), so save yourself some time and money and support your existing customers by allowing them to easily ask questions and to find answers to questions you’ve already answered.

The more you connect with your customers and show them that you are there to support them, the more likely they will be to buy and return to you for future purchases, and Q&A is an ideal way to provide both pre-sales and post-sales support.

On that note, why not try out our Q&A plugin?  

A system that allows a community to ask questions, answer each other’s questions, and vet answers.

The “community” in question here could be employees within a company, members of a club, members of a site, people with a common interest or hobby, or even the population at large.  The “system” would typically be machine-based, either web or mobile (we’ll ignore physical and in-person Q&A systems for now.  Playing Trivial Pursuit doesn’t count.)

An important point here is the ability for the community to vet answers, and this is what sets social Q&A systems apart from other community and UGC tools. People can ask and answer questions within a comments area or in a site forum, but neither of those provide effective tools for the community to vet answers.

General Social Q&A Systems

The early social Q&A sites were almost all general Q&A systems, meaning that people could ask questions about virtually any topic. They may not get an answer, but the field was wide open for the asker. Here are some of the most popular general social Q&A systems:

• Yahoo Answers
• Answers.com
• Answerbag
• Chacha
• Aardvark (Google)
• Askville (Amazon)
• Naver (Korean)

General Q&A systems tend to produce fast answers, but they are often derided because the answers are inaccurate or just found from a Google search.  This is because the people who hang out on these general sites tend to be generalists who are trying to be helpful, but often don’t have domain-specific knowledge.  To address the weaknesses of general Q&A systems, witness the rise of…

Niche Social Q&A Systems

Niche Q&A systems which have proven to be a powerful way to get quality answers. The advantage they have is that they cater to communities of interest, so most people who are asking and answering are already fairly well educated on the topic, and therefore the quality of answers is higher all-around. Some popular niche Q&A systems include:

• StackOverflow
• Quora
• Trulia Answers

I should probably note that Quora is built as a general Q&A site, but it has attracted a niche community, so the Q&A there revolve around the tech industry and startups. Perhaps they plan to expand beyond that community, but for now I consider it a niche Q&A site because it is not very useful at providing answers about topics that are not popular among the Silicon Valley tech crowd.

Spend a little time perusing StackOverflow.com. Even if you are not a programmer, you can tell that the level of conversation on that site is elevated from that of a Yahoo Answers, and this is because of its focus. Its visitors are programmers, some experts, some newbies, but they are all programmers, so the questions tend to be well-written, and the answers in general are of a high quality, particularly the answers that have a high number of votes, or those that were accepted as a “best answer” by the original asker.

How can social Q&A help my site?

Now think about your site. You probably have a community of interest on your site, whether it’s wind-surfers, people who enjoy flowers, or accountants. Some of those people are experts, and some are less experienced and are trying to learn. Social Q&A works very well within these focused communities because it lets the experts in your community share their knowledge and experience without it getting lost in the conversation that is typical with community tools like forums or comments.

Your users want answers

New users to your site, especially those coming from search are looking for something. They’re looking for an answer, a product, a service, a solution – something.  If that new visitor doesn’t find what they’re looking for right away, what do they do?  That’s right: they bounce.

Your challenge as a site owner is to create a relationship with that visitor in the short time you have with them, no matter what page they land on.  Not many will post a comment in order to get an answer, and even fewer will take the time to find and register for a forum, so you need to reduce the obstacles between them and their answer as much as possible.

Give them a path to an answer

Rather than slapping any old social media tools on your site, make sure your visitors know that they can ask a question on your site, no matter what page they are on.  Prompt them to ask a question, and they will be more confident that they can get an answer and will be more likely to even ask, and then you’ve won!  Once they ask a question, you can start to build a relationship with that visitor by giving an answer yourself, or by letting your visitors give their answers.  When they get an answer, they’re more likely to come back, to thank the person who gave the answer, and to continue to engage with your site.

Building relationships is a win-win

With social Q&A on your site, your visitors will create a knowledgebase for you, a knowledgebase that will help engage new users, and retain existing users.  New users will be more likely ask questions and return if they see they’re likely to get answers, and your repeat visitors, once they see that they’re getting recognized for their positive contributions, will come back to help others.  People are naturally helpful, so give them a way to help each other, and give them a way to get recognized for their efforts.  Social Q&A is an ideal fit.

We built Degree3 to help you leverage the power of niche Q&A. We aim to give you the most powerful Q&A tools you can find while also making them dead simple to install and administer. Have questions about how to leverage Q&A for your site? Just get in touch with us at support@degree3.com, and we’ll help you put together a Q&A solution that benefit your site and your visitors!

Related:

• How Q&A helps small businesses connect with customers

Amazon has now released the Kindle Fire, a color tablet that is based on the Android OS rather than their proprietary Kindle OS, just as I told them to.  The world doesn’t need another OS, and Amazon doesn’t need to waste money designing one, so they’re much better off leveraging Google’s OS and adding the Kindle software on top of it.

While Amazon is still offering Kindle dedicated e-readers, it seems clear that the Fire will be Amazon’s focus going forward, and the dedicated e-reader platform will probably be de-emphasized and fall by the wayside as tablets get cheaper and the price difference between tablets and dedicated e-readers approaches zero.

So to Amazon, I say well done: you’re focusing on what you’re good at and providing a reasonably full-featured tablet at a very competitive price.  Will it put pressure on the iPad?  Probably not a lot because it will be the category leader for the foreseeable future, but clearly the race to the bottom for tablet prices has started, just as it did for PCs a few years ago.

To enable your moderation queue, go to your Dashboard and click “Settings” for the site on which you want to enable the moderation queue. You can choose to review new questions before they go live, or new answers, or both. When you go back to your Dashboard, you’ll see that your site has a new “Moderate Q&A” link – this is where you can review and approve or reject new submissions. To keep the flow of conversation moving smoothly, we will notify you immediately via email when you have new submissions waiting to be moderated. Try it out, and let us know what you think!

I could talk about the “Qwikster” brand for the DVD service, too, but I try to avoid using expletives here.

Like a lot of people, I put up with the recent Netflix price hike because the service was still convenient and the Netflix queue is super useful.  But, now that I’ll have to deal with two different companies, two bills, two support systems, and two movie queues, there’s no way I’m keeping both subscriptions.  While it feels like a step backwards in time and away from the promise of THE CLOUD, I’ll probably keep the DVD subscription and drop streaming because the streaming selection is just too poor.  Netflix is bound to lose a good chunk of subscribers to both services over this, and it will be very interesting to see if they can continue to acquire content for their streaming service as their revenue drops.  If not, their business could become a downward spiral very quickly. (Full disclosure: I have had a short position on NFLX for some time now.)

Where do you guys think Netflix is headed?  Can their streaming business survive on its own?

Enough Netflix chatter – on to the real business!  We have just rolled out a couple new features that people had been requesting:

1. Question locking: Admins may now lock individual questions so non-admins may not submit new answers.  To lock questions, make sure you are logged in as an admin, open the popup window, and you’ll see a “Lock” tool next to the “Hide” tool under each question.
2. Site locking: Admins may now lock questions across their entire site, so only they may answer them.  To set this, go to your Dashboard on Degree3.com and click “Edit Site” next to the site you want to edit.  Any visitor to your site may still ask questions, of course, or using our plugin would be pretty pointless, now wouldn’t it?
3. Customize the welcome message: To change the welcome message on your Q&A module, see the bottom of our Customization Guide for details, or if you’re using WordPress, just update your plugin, and it’ll be in your Settings.  Note: this does not apply to the popup window, just the in-page module; if you’re using the tab layout, this does not apply.
4. New languages: Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) and Danish are now available!

Let us know how you like the new features, and keep those feature requests coming – we want to know what’s important to you!

That's a lot of comments. How many were helpful?

A recent article on Mashable had some good things to say about how websites integrate community with content.  The author’s main gist was that site owners should not just give up on providing community and leave that to the likes of Twitter and Facebook.  Instead, you should

Do it on your terms, but have a goal of enabling people to engage in the ways that they want. The content itself should be the hub for web discussion, and not just another spoke on the wheel. These practices will increase the value of your community, your content and your brand.

I agree completely that content should be the hub for discussion, and that we as site owners should be looking for better ways to enable this discussion.

Most sites these days settle for “comments”, which often take the form of an unthreaded pile of user-submitted content that sits below an article.  Comments tend to make sites look busy, but how many real conversations or exchanges of knowledge do you see taking place within comment threads?  On most sites, not many.  This may have been enough “community” to engage people in the early days of the web, but we have the tools to be smarter about it now.

Each site owner must ask him or herself, “How can I help my visitors interact with and help each other right here, on this page, without sending them to Facebook, Twitter, a forum, or, god forbid, Google?”

The answer to this question will vary depending on the site.  In the case of ecommerce sites, the answer may be user reviews, or user ratings.  If you are selling a product or service, the answer may be customer support forums.  If you’re discussing politics, comments may indeed be the way to go.  In my (somewhat biased) opinion, social Q&A could fit the bill in any of these contexts.  In many cases, you’ll want more than one of these solutions to fit your users’ various needs.

When thinking about adding community tools to your site, consider the following questions:

• What type of knowledge might my visitors have that would help other visitors? (Feedback on products, tips on solving a problem, personal experiences, etc.)
• If my visitors have knowledge that could help, how can I best enable them to share it? Is a plain text box enough, or would some structure help them organize their thoughts?
• Would a structured tool like user reviews or Q&A provide more value than plain comments?
• How can new visitors find the knowledge that other visitors have shared? Are you truly leveraging your UGC? Are the nuggets of wisdom buried in comments or forums?
• Is real-time helpful?  Real-time tools have a lot of buzz, but do my pages have enough simutaneous traffic for these tools to make sense?
• What can I do to make it easier for people to interact on my site? Don’t worry about people abusing/spamming the site until it actually happens – it’s great to prevent spam, but not good if captchas and email confirmations are keeping your community from getting off the ground.  Try to use passive spam filtering (like Akismet) rather than active moderation queues that slow down your feedback cycles.
• How can my community tools integrate intelligently with social media?  Don’t settle for “Post this comment on Facebook” because that type of interaction is unlikely to generate much interest when it appears in the user’s Facebook feed.  Look for tools that post things to Facebook or Twitter that are likely to generate feedback or direct people back to your site.

When Google+ launched, its Friend List feature quickly became one of the highlights of the service, making it easier for people to track their social circles and communicate with them independently.  Facebook has now released a new take on Friend Lists that brings their mostly unused version of Friend Lists to the forefront and makes them even easier to use that the Lists on Google+.

Because Facebook knows so much about you, they automatically group your friends into several default Friend Lists (work, family, etc.)  This makes a lot of sense for Facebook because they already have so much data about your relationships, so they should be able to do Friend Lists even better than Google+, and it looks like they finally are, despite their previous failings in the area.

The second big move Facebook just made is to allow people to “Subscribe” to other people.  This is a shot not only at Google+, but at Twitter as well.  Both of those services appeal to people who want one-way “follow” relationships, while Facebook has always required two-way friendships, meaning that if I “friend” you, you have to accept it in order for us to be friends and for me to see your updates in my feed.  But with Facebook’s new Subscribe feature, you can follow anyone who has a public feed.

These updates could game-changers for Facebook.  Until now, celebrities, politicians, musicians, and others who have a public persona and want people to “follow” their updates had to use Twitter, and a few (primarily tech-oriented) public figures recently started moving to Google+ because those services allowed one-way follow relationships.  With Facebook now supporting the same functionality, it is going to be much harder for Google+ to keep signing on celebrities and brands, particularly when so many marketers are already on and very familiar with Facebook and its tools.

Perhaps even more interesting than the features themselves is the fact that Facebook moved so quickly after the Google+ launch to counter its product positioning.  Is Facebook actually afraid of Google+?  Was Google+ putting a dent in its growth?  Or maybe G+’s early growth prompted FB to try to smack them down before they become a threat.  Either way, Facebook is clearly out for blood and is not going to let anyone edge into their territory.

So grab your popcorn and soda, because the fireworks between Google+ and Facebook are really heating up, and I think it’s very possible that Google+’s user growth will slow once people understand and start leveraging these two new features from Facebook.