Q&A as conversation

Marty (co-founder) and I were working on the Lilipip Brand Concept Template graciously provided at by Ksenia on her site for free. It’s designed to help you zero in on your marketing message for a 1 minute video.

I’ve been through that routine before, but this was a really good document and approach. No BS. A good balance between fact/emotional message. Very well done. We learned a lot from doing it, but one simple question at the outset was “what is your name and what is your history”.

We’ve been through a lot of product iterations for such a young company. Our original goal was broadly to improve the quality of discussion on the web. Web based discussions are too often unnavigable and nightmarish. Comments on blogs helped because they provided at least some structure for the topic and discussion. But it has limited breadth of application.

After going through many gyrations that went from debate-style structures to interviewing we realized that the ideal structure was questions and answers. Why? Because the best conversations are typically those that have good questions and because a question-followed-by-an-answer is a great unit of discussion. People can’t just post away willy-nilly, they only get one answer. So the noise ratio goes way down and many voice are heard.

But what about the meta-communication that adds that certain richness and back-and-forth to the conversation? Well we handle that by making them comments and meta to the heart of the discussion. We didn’t know how it would all shake out and whether people would get it – but happily they did.

The result has been structured, discoverable discussions where the best questions and answers can be surfaced while still allowing for self-expression.

The Power of Q&A on Question Land

I had a tool in my cutlery drawer for many years and had no idea what it was. I decided to ask the people at The Stranger what it was and see if anyone could figure it out. I thought it was a long shot since this thing was both obscure and old and for all I knew was a part of some other long lost gizmo. But I went ahead and asked. And sure enough, I got the answer in less than 24 hours. I was amazed. You try it. Don’t read the answers and see if you can get it.

The different forms of Q&A

Two companies have recently launched Q&A related products: Hunch and Aardvark. I have to say, I love both of their names. Both are open for invites.

Hunch appears to be taking the approach of the crowd-sourced decision-tree. You ask it a question and it in turn asks you questions and then provides an answer and tells you its degree of certainty. It asks you questions so it can get to know you better and give you better answers. Clever idea. It’s early days and early reviews and users seem mixed.

Aardvark is getting far more positive reviews and is self-described “social search”. The idea is that you ask a question and Aardvark forwards it through your social network based on their expertise as expressed on their profiles.

There is a lot of work being done around Q&A, some of it really innovative because one of the main things people do online is ask questions.

Google Moderator… but with answers

Google released Moderator as a tool to help solicit questions from an audience: participants can suggest a questions and/or vote on previously suggested questions. The results are ranked and presumably the questions are then used for whatever the purpose was in asking them. It’s a great idea. But it’s missing one thing… answers.

With YouSaidIt you can ask the audience for questions, allow them to be ranked, and when that process is complete change your settings such that the questions can be answered. Answers can be provided in a variety of ways: by the author/host, by one or more selected guest experts or by the audience themselves.

Try it it out: YouSaidIt

Start an interview, change the setting to allow audience questions (you can choose to moderate or not), set answers to interviewees only for now (you can change it later if you want the audience to answer).