Thank you for your interesting question. I would be delighted to
offer you my perspective on Q&A services like Google Answers and
suggestions for how you could be effective at launching your own
service. I became a Google Answers Researcher in 2001, shortly after
the service launched. I have answered almost 450 questions with a 4+
star average rating, so I feel competent to provide you with my
opinion about Q&A services.
1.1 Marketing/promotion is very important, of course. Google Answers
have the advantage of being associated with Google, which attracts
significant traffic. Even though Google Answers was largely hidden
within the web site until its Beta status was removed, and it has
rarely appeared on the Google homepage, it was able to attract an
audience fairly quickly. People seem to like to explore the Google
web site because it has "cool," occasionally obscure features.
However, even with this advantage, the number of outstanding questions
took a while to reach present levels.
If your site is focused on a particular domain of interest, then you
would want to purchase advertising on sites catering to people with
that interest. Purchasing keywords through Google and other search
engines would be an additional effective way to market it. A general
interest web site is more difficult to market with a limited number of
keywords because of its broad scope, but you could identify frequently
asked topics from Google Answers and purchase keywords associated with
those. You might also seek an affiliation with one of the other
search engines that do not offer a similar service. There is
certainly demand for this type of service as Google Answers
demonstrates, so I think your service could be successful if you can
provide a quality product.
1.2 Rating/Feedback is important primarily because it gives you, the
site operator, a flag when quality is potentially becoming a problem
without requiring you to read all of the postings. It gives question
askers feeling of confidence that they have some control over the
quality of the answer they are likely to receive, and it provides an
incentive for researchers to make customers happy. The ability to
give tips is also a good idea in my opinion because it provides
researchers with further incentive to satisfy customers. Customers
need to receive clear information about how the rating system and tips
work. Customers should also have the opportunity to receive a refund
if they are dissatisfied with an answer and their dissatisfaction is
remotely legitimate. A lifetime limit on the number of refunds, such
as that imposed by eBay, could be useful to deter abuse of the
feature.
1.3 Customer Education. It is important that customers understand how
the system works. Many questions can exist about how the system works
in terms of questions/comments/clarifications. Customers can easily
be confused by how the clarification process is supposed to work.
Giving clear instructions to customers as part of the user interface
rather than burying them in terms of service and frequently asked
questions lists strikes me as a useful approach. I also think that
customers should be better encouraged to form relationships with
specific researchers by providing a formal mechanism for customers to
request a researcher address their question.
2.1 Applications/Qualification. This is easier if your site is
focused on a particular interest area because you can better define
what types of qualifications a good researcher will have. Requiring
prospective researchers to read a handbook of guidelines and answer
test questions before being accepted seems quite thorough and helps
ensure that only motivated people applied. There is clearly
significant demand to become a researcher, so there are definitely
qualified applicants out there. Making employment opportunities
available through the web site as well as posting them on major job
hunter web sites like monster.com should attract many candidates.
Some firms use school affiliations as part of their screening process.
For example, EssayEdge.com only accepts graduates of certain Ivy
League schools and Stanford as editors. I am continually impressed by
the quality of researchers Google Answers has managed to attract.
There is clearly tremendous demand for this type of flexible work, as
demonstrated by the large numbers of people falling for work at home
scams. I myself am disabled, so I cannot work on a regular office
environment on a fixed schedule, but my brain works fine, and I can
manipulate my computer using speech recognition software when I feel
up to it.
2.2 Community/Mess room. While I myself have not found bulletin
boards/e-mail lists to be particularly essential, many researchers do
enjoy participating in them, even when they are not sponsored by the
service provider. They build a sense of community and encourage
researchers to participate on the site, so I think they are a good
idea. A regular newsletter for researchers describing good things to
do, bad things not to do, problems encountered, changes in policy, and
recognizing skilled and prolific researchers is a useful tool.
2.3 The rating system needs to be viewed as being fair and
understandable. There should be a formal mechanism for researchers to
identify customers who have requested their services. The
identification of good, prolific researchers based on uniform
standards made known to all researchers and the awarding of
gifts/additional compensation to those individuals is a good idea.
2.4 The ability to lock questions is important so that researchers are
assured that they will be able to answer the question once they
complete their research. However, it would be nice if researchers
could communicate amongst each other regarding the status of locks.
Paying for locks should be prohibited.
3.1 Terms of service are of course important from a liability
perspective, both the researcher's and the web site operator's.
Illegal activities certainly need to be prohibited. A clear statement
of policies and integration of information regarding those policies
into applicable portions of the user interface to make them noticeable
and understandable is a good approach.
3.2 To encourage researcher participation, the vast majority of the
fee should go to the researcher. The web site operator is in a
position to make a significant amount of money off of advertising once
a quality database of answers is established, so fees should not be
the primary consideration for web site operator revenue. They
obviously do need to cover the basic costs of offering the service,
though, during the startup phase.
3.3 Requiring a minimum payment threshold to keep overhead down, as
long as it is reasonable, is understandable. The offering of direct
deposit and/or PayPal payments in addition to mailed checks at the
researcher's discretion would be a nice option. An inexpensive
listing fee is a good idea to encourage customer participation; I
would consider free listing.
4.1 I think that giving customers the option of having their question
and answer be public or private is a good idea. Some customers prefer
privacy. If the intent is to use public answers to drive advertising
sales, then perhaps there could be a surcharge for private answers.
Private questions could be limited to researcher viewing only. Once
the question is answered, both the question and answer could be
limited to the customer only.
4.2 Attachments need to be supported. Customers expect it, and
third-party hosting is not reliable and can be tricky for customers to
use.
4.3 While there are issues with monitoring customer/researcher
interactions, I am also supportive of allowing customers and
researchers to e-mail one another when the customer has requested that
type of interaction. As long as the web site makes it clear that it
cannot be responsible for the content of such communications, I think
customers should be allowed to interact with researchers in any way
that they find mutually agreeable. I am a strong proponent of
customer service and giving customers what they want in the method
that they want it.
4.4 The commenting capability is a very tricky feature in my opinion.
There is a potential for confusion amongst customers regarding the
difference between answers and comments, and the difference between
researchers and random users. There is also a potential problem of
customers receiving free answers through comments and comments even
being used to create advertisements, neither of which are good for the
web site operator. While the comments do build community, I am not
sure I would leave them open to just anybody and would consider
reserving them for researchers only.
4.5 I do not think there should be a limit on pricing. There are lots
of projects that people need that are worth more than $200 that do not
get addressed because they will take too much time. This also
inherently limits the available revenue to both researchers and the
web site operator.
4.6 I am in favor of a formal mechanism for bidding on questions in a
case where a researcher feels that the question is underpriced but
would be willing to answer it for a higher price.
4.7 You need plenty of bandwidth and excellent server reliability.
You do not want your web site to ever be slow or down.
I hope this information is of value to you, and I would be happy to
provide you with additional comments if you need them.
Sincerely,
Wonko |
