What Makes Question and Answer Sites Popular? - So What Have We Learned?
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I encourage you to check out Microsoft Live's QnA site as well as Amazon's Askville, which I reviewed some time ago. You might also want to check out WikiAnswers. ReadWriteWeb also had a nice roundup of question and answer sites. Having checked several of these sites myself, I have a few tips for what seems to work.
First of all, don't get too ambitious to start with. You may have to revise your plans pretty seriously, and that could lead to some disappointed people. Second, be sure to get lots of beta testers, because community is very important for this kind of site; if questions go unanswered for too long, it looks dead. One reviewer of question and answer sites noted that the best ones seemed to be the ones with the most eyeballs.
While you can trust human nature to some extent for your supply of questions and answers, it's wise to have some kind of rating and reward system. Several of the sites I visited rewarded active users with greater “powers,” such as the ability to vote on the quality of answers. With this approach, you're actually rewarding people who have proven themselves to be reliable by letting them do some of your moderating for you. That's a win-win.
You will probably need to have some kind of community guidelines and standards. These need to be easily accessible, so users can read them and make sure they aren't violating them. Mahalo even includes a link when you're ready to post your answer, so you can check. I don't know how many people actually check to see whether they're violating standards, but it's a useful reminder.
Most question and answer sites are set up so that the questions are divided into categories. This encourages browsing. Once you get enough questions and answers, however, you will probably need to have some kind of search engine, so users don't have to keep asking the same questions. Think of a question and answer site as a specialized kind of forum, and that should give you a good grasp of what is needed.
Depending on your web presence, you might even take the approach that New Scientist did – rather than permitting general questions, limit queries to topics related to your field. I'm sure you can see several ways of applying this. Such a site would involve the same challenges to maintain it as any forum, with a few additional ones (the need to discourage idle “chatter” if you want your users to focus on questions and answers, for example).
As to the marketing potential of such sites, you can read my review linked above for how Amazon is making money from Askville. Question and answer sites are also good for hosting advertising, of course, with all that user-generated content. These kinds of sites may not work for everyone, but New Scientist has shown that you can start small and have it be a feature rather than devote an entirely separate site to questions and answers. This makes sense if you think question and answer sites are just a passing fad (remember, Google closed its own presence in this space). With a variety of options as to how you approach doing a question and answer site – including not doing one at all – the choice is yours. Good luck!
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