Quora: distraction or deliverance?

Contributed by Samantha McGarry

As a communicator, Quora pushes all my buttons -- in a good way. But folks, let’s get serious. Let’s get over ourselves. Let’s stop trying to be cool and popular, let’s put on our business heads and focus on value and effort. Amid all this Quora buzz (and there have been several interesting articles written in recent days,) the following questions leap out at me. I don’t have the answers; I’m not sure anyone does yet. But it behooves us to think about this stuff before we jump on the bandwagon.

• How do I manage another social site? I could spend hours on Quora but, seriously, I have a long, long to-do list to get to.
• How do I best use it to complement what I’m already doing for clients on Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, …etc.?
• Show me the APIs! If Quora is going to stick around, I’m going to need it to talk to my social media monitoring and measurement systems.
• Other than we cool PR/social media/ IT peeps, who else is using Quora? Aren’t we just all talking to ourselves right now? Or is there a serious B2B or B2C audience?
• Should I be recommending that clients participate to share content and build thought leadership?
• Is it a viable lead gen or referring traffic source for inbound marketing?
• Is it influencing attitudes and buying decisions?

Ultimately, Quora feels like another interesting model for finding and sharing information and answers, engaging with quality people, and for distributing and linking to valuable content. But I also think we need to slow down and assess its viability – or we’ll be spending all our time in Quora-land and not enough time focusing on what really matters as PR professionals: delivering value and results.