Credit gowildlife.org

Knowledge wants to be free.

Our Q&A systems enable hundreds of sites to help their visitors exchange knowledge every day, and that exchange is free – someone asks, someone answers, and it’s all done by people who are trying to help others.  There is no financial reward, and no tangible reward at all, aside from the prospect of a “thank”, or a little recognition for a helpful gesture.

In that spirit of free exchange of knowledge, we are taking the price tag off of our Pro plan because we think the features the Pro plan offers can be super helpful to even small sites without a budget.  We want sites of all shapes and sizes to be able to help their visitors quickly and easily with our Q&A tools.

So as of today, our Pro plan is completely free.  The Pro plan consists of:

• Instant Search
• Answer Comments
• FAQ Builder
• Theme Editor
• Categories
• 5 Moderators

If you currently have a Degree3 Q&A free plan, you’ll be automatically upgraded.  If you are paying for your plan currently, you will no longer be billed.  If you had a Pro plan with the Whitelabel or Private Q&A Addons, those addons will still work.

Now that more of you can try out our advanced features, we’d love to hear from you!  Tell us what you think, what you’d like to see added, or just let us know how it’s working for you and your community.

It’s also not this:

No, it isn’t that.  When we here at Degree3 talk about chicklets, we aren’t referring to something as tasty or cute as the images above (respectively.  Or vice versa, if you’re a fan of chicken McNuggets.)

No, this is the kind of chicklet we talk about:

More helpful than cute or tasty

You’re probably already familiar with these chicklets for Facebook or Twitter, so we put together a chicklet you can easily put alongside your Facebook or Twitter chicklets, and it will show how many questions have been asked on that page, and your users can click it to ask or answer questions in a popup window, just like the other plugin layouts you’re familiar with.

This feature is in beta, so there may be some kinks, but we’d love to know if you like this layout and if you think it’s useful.

And yes, the Chicklet will work on the same page that’s already using a tab or module.

To try it out, go to your Dashboard, then click Get Plugin, and you’ll see an option for the Chicklet layout.  Chicklets are not yet available for the WordPress plugin – if you want them in WordPress, let us know!

Degree3 Support Page sporting an FAQ Module

No two ways about it, I love me a good FAQ, and so do your visitors, and that’s why we were very happy to see that several of our customers had started building FAQs already (a premium plan is required.)

Naturally, once people started using our FAQs, they pointed out some new features they wanted, so we’re releasing  improvements to FAQs today.

First, all plugins using the Module layout will now show an “FAQ” link in the header, next to “Current Questions”, naturally only if you have selected to show your FAQ in the FAQ Builder.

Also, you now have the option of showing the FAQ categories in the module rather than the latest questions, as you can see in the screenshot above, or on our Support page.

To do this, you’ll need to use a new setting in the code: you’ll need to add “&content=faq” in your module plugin code, and then it will automagically show up.  For example, here’s the code for our Support page:

<script src="http://degree3.com/js/c/d3_widget_200007.js?content=faq"
type="text/javascript"></script>
<div id="d3-widget"></div>

The FAQ module will show all of the first-level categories in your FAQ, regardless of how many there are, so we recommend having somewhere between 5-12 top-level categories to make the plugin easy for your visitors to read.

Give these new features a try, and please let us know how you like them!  Wordpress support coming soon!

If you’re looking to…

• Retain more visitors
• Increase loyalty
• Improve customer service, or
• Build LIFETIME relationships with customers and increase revenue

…try out our new premium plans for free for 30 days, and tell us what you think!  We’ve got a lot of features still in the pipeline, so lock in your low price now!  In only 30 seconds, you can have a fully-functional Q&A Community available on EVERY PAGE OF YOUR SITE so you stop losing visitors and start building relationships with them instead.

Our premium plans deliver answers faster and enable conversations with:

• Instant Search: your visitors can FIND ANSWERS INSTANTLY as they type their question
• FAQ Builder: add popular questions to your FAQ with one click – no more tedious FAQ maintenance!
• Comments: let visitors follow-up and discuss specific answers
• Theming: customize your Q&A Community to match your site
• Priority Support: personal help in setting up your community, and guaranteed email response in less than 24 hours

Also available as addons (or included with the Corporate Plan) are:

• Whitelabel Plugin: Remove the Degree3 branding to ensure a consistent, seamless experience for your visitors
• Private Q&A: Keep your Q&A strictly on your site (not shared with Degree3.com) – ideal for Intranet use or sensitive information

There’s no commitment and no credit card required for the trial, so pick your plan and sign up now to try it out!

Not much happened in my life between being born and 2007.

When Facebook rolled out its “Timeline” to replace their Profile pages, it seemed like a neat gadget.  It seemed like an odd move to get rid of the activity stream that had been on Profiles before, but it was kind of neat to see an overview of the person’s life, along with the large picture they could choose to show at the top.  The Timeline is more visually interesting and distinct than the Profile, but over time something about it bothered me, and I didn’t really get get my mind around it until now:

The Facebook Timeline is morbid.

Where are we used to seeing the “timeline” paradigm?  History books.  Timelines are used for tracking progressions of significant events chronologically, events that usually have an explicit beginning and an explicit ending.

When I look at my Facebook Timeline, I feel it is a weird mesh of the profound and the trivial.  It lists a string of mostly insignificant events, things I’ve liked, comments I’ve posted, photos I’ve uploaded, songs I’ve listened to, and other nuggettes of daily life.  Alongside these minutiae, at one end is my start (birth), and at the other end…my end.  That’s pretty heavy for a social network profile page.

The timeline therefore becomes an online tombstone in progress.  Someday, nothing I do will show up on it anymore, and my friends and family will come to my Facebook Timeline to see what happened in my life, and they’ll see that I liked this viral cat video, or listened to Lady Gaga on Spotify.  Maybe a few significant events will be sprinkled in between, but how much of what we do every day on Facebook is really significant or worth remembering for more than a few hours?

It is this unintentional memorializing of the trivialities of life that I object to, and why I wish Facebook would bring back the old Profiles.  I liked them when they felt fluffy, when they were fleeting, and changed constantly based on my whims, and captured the essence of now rather than documenting my existence for future generations to peruse and be amused by.

If I wanted to create a memorial to myself, a summary of my life, a memoir, I would do so on my own.  There are probably sites dedicated to this.  But why force this morbid paradigm onto my daily communications with friends and family, without giving me a choice in the matter?

Most design decisions Facebook are very much about living in the moment.  The News Feed, the Ticker, Chat, Messaging, Open Graph, Places – all have been built to spread information about NOW, about what I’m doing, where I’m doing it, and whom I’m doing it with, so to slap a layer on top of this that turns my Profile into a living document of my life is intensely off-pitch.

As it stands, the morbidity of the Timeline has largely turned me off from using Facebook.  Hopefully Facebook will realize the error of their ways and rebuild Timelines to be more temporal and less monumental.  Time will tell…

It's hard to faithfully convey "fast" in a picture, so here's a picture of fast food. Credit: SteFou

Today I’d like to talk about a new little feature that I think you all will find very useful.  Until now, we have sent you (the webmasters) daily digests of Q&A on your sites, giving you a nice summary of the activity, but we heard from some of you that you wanted to know FASTER when your visitors had questions so you could get to them right away.

So, today we launched instant question notifications!  To turn these on, just sign in to Degree3, go to your Dashboard, and click on the new “Notifications” link under your site’s name.  Here you can control both your daily digests and your instant question notifications.

As always, keep those suggestions coming – we’re working to make Degree3 a better service for you!

I'm so busy being social, I don't have time to put down my gun. Photo credit: Nigel

Nic Brisbourne recently posted on The Equity Kicker about “social saturation,” a concept put forth by the Forrester Research CEO George Colony to describe his finding that people are running out of time to give to social applications and software.  That’s right, the time that we spend checking Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Google+ may be close to peaking.  Social consumes such a huge chunk of our available time that we just can’t spare any more.

Colony went on to propose that in order for social applications to continue to grow in importance and relevance, they must become more useful and less of a diversion; they must help you solve problems rather than help you waste time.

This social saturation has some interesting implications for the large social players and Facebook in particular.  If we’re socially saturated (at least here in the US), our usage of Facebook is unlikely to grow much and Facebook will have to work harder to maintain their revenue growth.  They will surely optimize their ad platform further, put more emphasis on Facebook Credits, and will try more new monetization techniques as they strive to make the most of a market that they already own.

Look both ways before texting. Photo credit: Ed Yourdon

That said, Facebook is still expanding its reach in emerging markets, so even if their share of attention in the US is plateauing, they have plenty of room to grow globally.

Whether or not we’re really at our peak usage of social apps, we here at D3 wholeheartedly agree with the conclusion that social needs to be more focused on solving people’s problems, and this applies to everyone who builds or runs a website.  This means YOU.

When you’re creating a social strategy for your site, focus on how your social elements can help your visitors, not how they can help you.  Can they inform your visitors, solve their problems, or (of course) answer their questions?

To get started, think about how your site can do any of the following, and how social could enhance these efforts:

• Educate people (e.g. Skillshare, Youtube Education)
• Solve people’s problems (StackOverflow, Yahoo Answers)
• Connect people with people who can help them (Quora, LinkedIn)
• Connect people in real life (Meetup)
• Entertain people (Zynga, Spotify, Turntable.fm, Netflix)
• Save people money (Livingsocial, woot, Amazon)
• Help people keep in touch with those they care about (Facebook, Google+)

The sites I listed have become popular (at least in part) because of their ability to integrate social elements to improve people’s lives.  If you can use social tools to give even one of these benefits to your visitors, you’ll be way ahead of your competition.  For the social companies out there that do not help people in one of these ways…their days are numbered if they can’t adapt and provide real value.  (Twitter is notably missing from this list.  With its myriad use cases, it can help in several/all of these categories, as can Facebook.)

Naturally, we believe Q&A is a perfect way to add social interaction to your site, to help your visitors, and to help them help each other.  It can educate, solve problems, connect people, save them money, and sometimes even entertain!  The most important point to remember is that if you are helping your visitors with your site’s content, tools, and social elements, they will reward you for it, either through subscriptions, purchases, or ad revenue.

We’d love to talk more with you about using Q&A to help your visitors, so drop us a line!

Thanks for the thank!

The holidays are almost here, and as we get ready to relax a little with family and friends, we have some feature updates for you!  Sorry, they’re not gift-wrapped, but hopefully you won’t mind.

• You can now set your intro text within the popup window!   Just go to your Dashboard and click “Settings” to update this.
• We have added social sharing buttons to the plugin, so visitors can share your Q&A on Facebook, Twitter, or via email!
• Easier to fully modify the CSS styles of the in-page Q&A module so it matches your site
• New layout options: tab AND module, and “none” – create your own Q&A button! (See “Layout” section.)
• Person information bubbles – if you hover your mouse over any person’s name within the Degree3 popup, you’ll see a balloon pop up with their stats, so you can see how many questions they’ve answered, and how many thanks they’ve received!
• Various UI improvements: the UI is cleaner now and has more contextual tools (tools that only appear when you need them.)  We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on these!

Yawn... don't rely on contact forms for pre-sales!

Social Q&A has a variety of applications, but small businesses have their own unique set of challenges, so I thought I’d spend a little time talking about how social Q&A can help small businesses create and maintain relationships with their customers, so those customers are more likely to complete a sale and then keep coming back when they need support or new products or services.

(Not sure what social Q&A is?  See my last post here.)

Pre-Sales

As a small business, you’re probably not thinking about creating a “community” on your site; you’re interested in marketing your products or services, and you’re interested in making sales.

So to help you make sales, let’s first look at the typical customer decision-making process.  It goes roughly like this (I’ll use the word “widget” here in the classical sense, representing a product or service that you offer.):

1. Problem recognition (“Hey, I think I need to buy a widget!”)
2. Information search (“What kind of widgets are available?” 36% of consumers do research on a company’s website before buying, so you need to be ready for them.)
3. Evaluation of alternatives (“What kind of widget is best for me?”)
4. Decision Implementation (“Here’s some money for that blue widget in the corner.”)
5. Post-purchase evaluation (“Is this really the right widget for me?”)

In the pre-sales phase, you are reaching the customer while they’re in Steps 1-3.   The customer may not even know that they need the widget yet, so you may need to first convince them of why they need it, show them what widgets you have available, and show them how your widgets are better than that other guy’s widgets, all BEFORE they can get to Step 4 and actually BUY your widget.

That’s a lot of convincing, and you have very little time before the customer gets bored and moves on!

This is where Q&A comes in.  No matter how comprehensive your site is, these customers WILL have questions that your site doesn’t answer.  Don’t lose these customers!  Give them an easy way to ask you questions directly about your products or services, right there on the page they are on.  Do not rely on contact forms or email, because these feel “faceless” to visitors, and they often won’t bother contacting you because they’re not sure if they’ll get an answer.

With Q&A, your customers can see that you are available and eager to answer their questions, and this puts you in a very positive light in their consumer’s eyes.  Would they rather buy this service from the woman who’s actively answering her visitors’ questions on Site A, or the guy who has a “Contact me” form on Site B?   I know which one I’d choose.

Customer service is the name of the game these days; if people think you’re attentive and looking to help them, you give them confidence in their purchasing decision, and they’re more likely to buy from you.  And that leads us to the next phase of the purchase:

Post-Sales

So your customer has now purchased something from you and they have questions for you about how to use it, how to maintain it, or about additional services that they might require.  They may call or email you directly, but…they may not.  They are likely to look at your site, especially if it helped them get answers in the pre-sales phase, and again Q&A can help:

You want people to ask their questions on your site first. If they don’t, what are the alternatives?

• They ask on a forum somewhere
• They ask a friend
• They ask on a competitor’s site
• They don’t ask and just stop using your product/service

Of course none of these options are good for your potential of making a new sale or maintaining a positive brand image.  You want to have the first opportunity to give a good answer to your customers, so they feel confident in you and your products or services, and because they already saw that you have Q&A before they bought, they know that they can get support directly on your site.

It’s MUCH cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one (the numbers vary by industry), so save yourself some time and money and support your existing customers by allowing them to easily ask questions and to find answers to questions you’ve already answered.

The more you connect with your customers and show them that you are there to support them, the more likely they will be to buy and return to you for future purchases, and Q&A is an ideal way to provide both pre-sales and post-sales support.

On that note, why not try out our Q&A plugin?  

A system that allows a community to ask questions, answer each other’s questions, and vet answers.

The “community” in question here could be employees within a company, members of a club, members of a site, people with a common interest or hobby, or even the population at large.  The “system” would typically be machine-based, either web or mobile (we’ll ignore physical and in-person Q&A systems for now.  Playing Trivial Pursuit doesn’t count.)

An important point here is the ability for the community to vet answers, and this is what sets social Q&A systems apart from other community and UGC tools. People can ask and answer questions within a comments area or in a site forum, but neither of those provide effective tools for the community to vet answers.

General Social Q&A Systems

The early social Q&A sites were almost all general Q&A systems, meaning that people could ask questions about virtually any topic. They may not get an answer, but the field was wide open for the asker. Here are some of the most popular general social Q&A systems:

• Yahoo Answers
• Answers.com
• Answerbag
• Chacha
• Aardvark (Google)
• Askville (Amazon)
• Naver (Korean)

General Q&A systems tend to produce fast answers, but they are often derided because the answers are inaccurate or just found from a Google search.  This is because the people who hang out on these general sites tend to be generalists who are trying to be helpful, but often don’t have domain-specific knowledge.  To address the weaknesses of general Q&A systems, witness the rise of…

Niche Social Q&A Systems

Niche Q&A systems which have proven to be a powerful way to get quality answers. The advantage they have is that they cater to communities of interest, so most people who are asking and answering are already fairly well educated on the topic, and therefore the quality of answers is higher all-around. Some popular niche Q&A systems include:

• StackOverflow
• Quora
• Trulia Answers

I should probably note that Quora is built as a general Q&A site, but it has attracted a niche community, so the Q&A there revolve around the tech industry and startups. Perhaps they plan to expand beyond that community, but for now I consider it a niche Q&A site because it is not very useful at providing answers about topics that are not popular among the Silicon Valley tech crowd.

Spend a little time perusing StackOverflow.com. Even if you are not a programmer, you can tell that the level of conversation on that site is elevated from that of a Yahoo Answers, and this is because of its focus. Its visitors are programmers, some experts, some newbies, but they are all programmers, so the questions tend to be well-written, and the answers in general are of a high quality, particularly the answers that have a high number of votes, or those that were accepted as a “best answer” by the original asker.

How can social Q&A help my site?

Now think about your site. You probably have a community of interest on your site, whether it’s wind-surfers, people who enjoy flowers, or accountants. Some of those people are experts, and some are less experienced and are trying to learn. Social Q&A works very well within these focused communities because it lets the experts in your community share their knowledge and experience without it getting lost in the conversation that is typical with community tools like forums or comments.

Your users want answers

New users to your site, especially those coming from search are looking for something. They’re looking for an answer, a product, a service, a solution – something.  If that new visitor doesn’t find what they’re looking for right away, what do they do?  That’s right: they bounce.

Your challenge as a site owner is to create a relationship with that visitor in the short time you have with them, no matter what page they land on.  Not many will post a comment in order to get an answer, and even fewer will take the time to find and register for a forum, so you need to reduce the obstacles between them and their answer as much as possible.

Give them a path to an answer

Rather than slapping any old social media tools on your site, make sure your visitors know that they can ask a question on your site, no matter what page they are on.  Prompt them to ask a question, and they will be more confident that they can get an answer and will be more likely to even ask, and then you’ve won!  Once they ask a question, you can start to build a relationship with that visitor by giving an answer yourself, or by letting your visitors give their answers.  When they get an answer, they’re more likely to come back, to thank the person who gave the answer, and to continue to engage with your site.

Building relationships is a win-win

With social Q&A on your site, your visitors will create a knowledgebase for you, a knowledgebase that will help engage new users, and retain existing users.  New users will be more likely ask questions and return if they see they’re likely to get answers, and your repeat visitors, once they see that they’re getting recognized for their positive contributions, will come back to help others.  People are naturally helpful, so give them a way to help each other, and give them a way to get recognized for their efforts.  Social Q&A is an ideal fit.

We built Degree3 to help you leverage the power of niche Q&A. We aim to give you the most powerful Q&A tools you can find while also making them dead simple to install and administer. Have questions about how to leverage Q&A for your site? Just get in touch with us at support@degree3.com, and we’ll help you put together a Q&A solution that benefit your site and your visitors!

Related:

• How Q&A helps small businesses connect with customers