Why Is Quora Exploding?

What is Quora? Good question. There are lots of people on Quora waiting to provide you with answers, discuss and then debate it all. It’s fun, simple and global.

But more importantly, why is this new brand worth examining as a chief marketing officer? What lessons are there to learn about this new brand and its swarm of intelligent global thought leaders?

Well, for one thing, it has no overarching brand name--unlike many of its contemporaries--and yet, thousands of today’s culturally aware and savvy global marketers have joined its ranks. Moreover, the floodgates are open and every day, many more keep coming onboard.

Quora describes itself as: “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.”

For marketers, think of this as an example of radical new movement marketing. It’s the perfect example of how a thing can pop into popular consciousness out of nowhere, and with a nominal marketing budget, spark a mass movement worldwide--super fast.

There is a clear marketing strategy here. Quora connects with a big idea on the rise in culture (step one of movement marketing), in this case, our insatiable desire for the truth. (We have all become truth junkies, searching for answers.) It has crystallized the idea on the rise in culture. It has created a community of truth junkies. It has given us tools. It has built-in marketing sustainability, through powerful use of social media and RSS feeding. A good case to study, no?

It’s also an example of how what was once an advertising idea can now become big, sexy new business. Two years ago, StrawberryFrog was working on the evolution of “World Wise” for Morgan Stanley. We developed the idea of Questions & Answers as a platform for a marketing movement. Go ahead, ask questions and we, the brand, will answer your questions. Q&A. Simple and relevant for the financially confused. (Everyone.) Not an overpromise or another financial marketing slogan, but a thoughtful utility. Back then, it was a movement primarily in the context of marketing. Today, Quora has taken this same idea and built it into a lovely space where genteel thought leaders ask questions, provide answers and debate ideas in an open forum. I haven’t seen any stalkers in here yet.

Unexpected or thoughtfully planned out? An accident or the maximization of a radically new and smarter form of marketing that is igniting newbie brands and enabling them to take over the world? (See my earlier piece about “Movements”.)

The idea behind Quora’s success is more than they describe in the "About" portion of its site. It has a naturally built-in marketing idea along with a solid social media platform. It presents questions in a way that can identify, say, an individual’s point of view and then open it up for debate, which is what happened with me. I received an RSS pop that someone named Sara had asked the questions whether Cultural Movements was a marketing phrase that was, like other marketing phrases, getting tired. I decided to reply to Sara, because I had heard of Quora, I was intrigued by it and wanted to try it out. And then I belonged to the thoughtful community of online debating.

I was trapped and inspired. So much so that I couldn’t help myself from asking a series of questions while I was at the Consumer Electronics Show last week in Vegas. “Which new Tablet should I check out at CES?” Or, more blatantly: “Will the Tablet kill off the Laptop?” Or even something more mundane, like “Who is at CES?” in which I received an instant number of replies. I started to feel drawn to other questions like: "Does anyone think that social media really works as a marketing tool?" or "What are the top Social Media measurement tools paid or free?" or "What do interns want from their agency internships?" or "Will we ever see the day when humans will have technology embedded in our brains?"

Fun no?

Why does this feel special? Probably because it feels a lot like me. Quora speaks to me. If it wasn’t aligned with my personality of asking questions, providing answers and engaging in respectful dialog and intelligent debate, I’d opt out. How much of this feeling of validation, belonging and recognition can be planned and manufactured? In the context of Quora it seems most of the experience is designed around this, though there are subtle things that make it special like the ability to provide only one answer per question. Perfect for those discussions when someone has unending number of answers. The discovering of the site in itself is far more interesting than being Facebooked by the 2000th person. I believe that Quora’s wider publicity will eventually dilute this special feeling brought on by scarcity.

For marketers, my take away about Quora is this: The advantage today when building a brand is one must really understand all aspects of the social-business-marketing-movement. The entire experience. This is why Quora is exploding.

What do you think? Join the movement, add to the discussion on Quora: Why is Quora exploding?