For those of you who haven’t been introduced to Quora, it’s a site that’s collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. In other words, it’s a wiki tool for crowdsourcing content about any subject. Although still quite new, it could be an effective tool for event, conference, tradeshow and even wedding planners. Sure there are plenty of others, like Twitter, Facebook Pages and Formspring, that allow you to ask and answer questions, but Quora seemingly blends the best of all of these worlds (and more):
1. Invite your attendees to ask questions of you
“The host hotel is booked, where is the best place to stay during your conference?”, or “I tried to book a Gala table but I can’t get 4 sets together. Any suggestions?”. There are often many questions asked of planners throughout the planning process. From accommodations to food allergies to course materials, many people share the same questions. The benefit of a site like Quora is that questions can be asked and answered for all to see. The other key benefit is that the community also has an opportunity to weigh in on those questions, which encourages networking, information sharing and new ideas for the planner.
2. Invite your attendees to ask questions of your speakers, and vice versa
As a speaker myself, I often ask planners if there’s a way to ask the attendees questions well before the event. After all, it helps me to create content that is custom tailored to the needs of their attendees. Quora is one answer. Speakers can create their own topics and ask for questions. Or speakers can monitor the wiki to find out if anyone has a question relevant to their session. Speakers can also send an update to their connections through social media sites asking people to ask them a question (which promotes your event wiki).
3. Create FAQs
Are there questions that keep popping up year after year? Quora has a FAQ function that lets attendees view the answers easily.
4. Get your attendees talking to one another
As people get used to using Quora to answer their questions, there’s a good possibility that they will start to use it to ask and answer questions from each other. Congratulations…you’re one step closer to creating a valuable community.
5. Promote questions
A very interesting feature of Quora is that as questions are answered you can promote answers via social networks, which amplifies the awareness of your event or conference. It can also show your willingness to immerse yourself in your community and play an active role in their pre- and post- event experience.
6. Create child topics
As the moderator of your topic, you can bundle questions that are related. For example, you might have created a topic called “Your Food Questions”. You might also notice that community members are creating related topics like “Where to go for dinner”, “I have allergies, what do I do”, etc. You can make the latter child topics under the food umbrella to make it easier for people to navigate through and find questions relevant to them.
7. Identify sages
There are likely people in your event community who are a wealth of information and have a great willingness to share their insights. These are your event’s sages. These people, who evangelize your event and seek to elevate your attendees’ experiences, should be recognized. Quora is a great tool to help you identify these sages.
8. Follow a topic
With one click, anyone can choose to follow a topic and be notified when a new question or answer has been added.
9. Voting feature
Beside each answer provided on a particular topic there is a voting feature that lets you vote the answer up or down. This is really helpful for those who asked the question to identify what the community thinks is the best answer. It also helps the planner identify how popular items are surrounding their event.
10. Analytics / Insights
There are pretty limited analytics at this time. You can see how many times a question has been viewed, monitored and followed. But you can also clearly see who follows the topic and, when you click on their avatars, what other topics they follow.
I’ve been using Quora for a few weeks now and really like this tool. But, at the end of the day, it is but one more tool in the event planners’ toolbox. Careful consideration should be made to what you’re looking to achieve, who you’re looking to dialogue with, where they spend their time online, how they use social tools, etc, before selecting which tools make the most sense for your event.
I’d love to know your thoughts…
Hi, I noticed that this post is a little old and was wondering if you still use it or know if it is still relevant?