How to Build Your Reputation on Social Q&A Sites: Online Collaboration«

Can social Q&A sites really help you build your professional reputation? And if so, how can you use them effectively? I’ve taken a look at three sites that offer similar Q&A functionality, yet are vastly different under the surface. Beyond the Q&A features, each site attracts a different set of users, and offers varying amounts of immediacy, usefulness as an information tool and value as a profile builder.

Here is a breakdown of how to useQuora,FocusandNamesaketo enhance your professional reputation.

Quora

I recently wrote aboutusing Quora for getting answers to business-related questions. While I think the quality of conversation on Quora can be good, sometimes you feel like you are posting a question into a big, black hole. Still, with theamount of buzz happening around the site,getting in now to“stake your claim” in your areas of expertise isn’t a bad idea.

When starting to use Quora as a reputation-builder, make sure to fill out your profile information thoroughly, including the sections on the site where you can include your“bio” for various topics. Even if you aren’t ready to spend time answering questions, you want to make sure your expertise is showcased concisely, otherwise people will arrive at your Quora profile page and have no idea who you are or what you do. Keep the length down and make sure the first handful of words convey something meaningful because this is what others will see when you answer questions in a given topic area.

To get more out of Quora, follow the topics that you believe you can contribute meaningfully to. Respond to questions when you have a specific point of view or expertise that hasn’t yet been demonstrated. Follow the people with whom you are truly interested in getting on their radar, learning from, or interacting with.

Quora has a section in your profile where you can post content. This can be a good place to re-purpose some of your relevant content and tagging it with specific topic keywords to add your two cents without specifically answering a question. You can also answer a question and link to your content elsewhere, although do this sparingly as this can appear gratuitous if you simply use Quora to point people to your blog or site. Don’t think of Quora as a“gateway” to your other presences, like your blog, but instead think of it as an opportunity to provide a snapshot of who you are and what you do on a site where people are paying attention.

Because of Quora’s breadth of topics, you can choose almost any area and set of topics to show what you know. However, the most active areas are the tech, new and social media, and mobile spaces.

Focus

If your expertise is useful to small business owners, you may want to head over toFocus. This site has been around a few years now and while Quora came out of beta with a bang, Focus has been building a rich database of information and experts a little under the radar and now boasts over a million active users. While Quora tackles a broad range of topics, Focus looks to help business owners make better decisions, so expect to find more business topics and technology topics related to business.

On Focus, Q&A is only one of the site’s features. Think of it as an expert network or“expert market” where business owners can not only get answers to their questions but download published research and attend live teleconference events.

As you fill out your Focus profile, you can opt to check a box to apply to become an official“expert” on the site, but there is no guarantee you’ll be chosen. Focus takes a careful look at several criteria to assess if you are actually an expert in your field and if you have a proclivity for sharing your knowledge with others in a longer format such as on a blog versus Twitter. They also look at your interactions and the retweets your content generates to see if what you write resonates with your community of followers.

If interested in having you as an official expert on their site, Focus will conduct a phone interview. Some experts providing long form research are compensated but not those solely participating in the community Q&A. Otherwise, you can contribute to the Q&A section in basically the same way you might on Quora. The site is constantly undergoing incremental changes to improve how it works, so expect to see better integration of features over time.

Namesake

Namesake calls itself a“community for real conversation.” Namesake takes a more“live” approach to conversations on topics, with announcements of conversations happening on the site, and the people participating and watching.. The conversations are then archived and can be added to over time.

There is a little more chaos on Namesake compared to Quora or Focus.com; every response isn’t carefully composed and the best aren’t always“endorsed” or voted up to the top. These are“conversations” after all. Namesake groups people, conversations and experts by topic, so like Quora and Focus, you should follow the topics that are most interesting and relevant to you, to find experts and to identify conversations where you can be an expert.

The site claims experts in broad topic areas, from technology to entertainment to politics. You can claim your areas of expertise (up to 10) when you are filling out your bio, but you gain expert credibility and status through endorsements from others for your conversation contributions. A nice feature on your Namesake bio is the ability to add video to showcase who you are and what you know.

Whereas Quora might feel like a place for tech insiders, and Focus is more business-oriented and straightforward, Namesake has a scrappier feel where tech hipsters are jumping into a sandbox to play and experiment.

Tips for Q&A Site Success

As you can see, all of these sites have Q&A as a feature, but Quora emphasizes this aspect the most. Regardless of which site you choose as your platform for showcasing your expertise, know that the process can be time-consuming (and possibly addicting). Here are a few tips for making the most of your efforts:

1. Pick one site.Be great. While you might dabble in all three sites to get a feel for them and to make sure they offer you the best audience for your information, to get more out of a Q&A site, you really need to pick one where you’ll spend most of your time and energy. Be thoughtful, and take care to get a feel for the community and learn the etiquette of the site. Be helpful.
2. Incorporate the site into your content production.If you’re already blogging and tweeting, participating actively in a Q&A site can feel like a burden. Look for ways to incorporate a little time each day on the Q&A site of your choice so you can be present, pay attention and add value. Over the long haul, you’ll find it easier and easier to make the time to contribute, but don’t get carried away and let it dominate your time unless it is proving to be a fruitful outlet.
3. Add to your content sharing.When you blog, find an appropriate way to share that in your profile or in an answer or as a post or update on a Q&A site. Make sure not to use the Q&A site as nothing more than a gateway or traffic driver to your blog or site, but do think of it as an additional place to archive examples of your work.
4. Go narrow, not broad.You can’t be all things to all people. You can’t be a true“expert” in many, many things. Part of building your reputation is knowing who you are, what you can offer others, and then focusing on providing consistent, valuable information. Sure, you can provide the occasional answer to a random topic (for example, I’ve responded to questions about RVing and parenting on Quora) because this shows you’re human and multidimensional. But when building your reputation and your brand, consistency is key.

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Planning Tool Ganttic Gets Streamlined, Now Easier to Use: Online Collaboration«

When Ilast lookedat Flash-based drag-and-drop online planning toolGantticlate last year, I was pleased with its functionality, but less impressed with the app’s complex user interface, which made it tricky to get familiar with. Since then, however, Ganttic has been redesigned with a greatly streamlined interface. If you previously tried Ganttic but were put off by its complexity, it’s worth trying again.

The user now has a choice of layouts: a simple streamlined view, and a new“wide” layout for advanced users, with additional data housed in a column on the left of the screen. Previously, the user was presented with several different“add” buttons; these have been consolidated down to a single button. The new simple view (shown above) definitely feels less bewildering than previous incarnations and should make the app much easier for project management novices to get to grips with; task and project information appears in pop-up windows. The advanced“wide” view (shown below) has task and project information on the left, which will probably work well for more experienced folks with larger monitors.

As well as the sleek now design, which has also been touched up cosmetically and now feels a lot more professional, there have been a fewuseful changes under the hood, too, including the ability to add URLs to tasks and projects, which means tasks can be linked to documents online. Additionally, there’s also now documentation available as adownloadable PDF file. While I’d prefer to see contextual help given in the app itself, it does cover the basics of using the app and setting up your first project, which should help novices to get to up to speed with the product.

Despite Ganttic’s new and improved interface, if all you need to do is sketch out a basic project plan, I’d still recommend going with the simplerTom’s Planner. However, if you’re looking for a more robust planning and scheduling tool— one that can scale with your projects as they get more complex— Ganttic has many more powerful features and its redesigned UI means that it should now be much easier to get to grips with.

A free Ganttic accountis good for up for up five users and 10 resources, while a Pro account costs€0.69 ($0.98 USD) per month for each user or resource. Alternatively, you can host Ganttic on your own server, which costs €23.95 for each user or resource.

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Firefox Feeling Sluggish? Disable Your Add-Ons: Online Collaboration«

Firefox 4 included an update to its JavaScript engine, which made for some serious performance gains. Now Mozilla is going after another cause of sluggishness: slow start-up times caused by add-ons. If your install of Firefox feels slow to start up, you may want to try disabling some add-ons. According to Mozilla, on average, each add-on a user has installed adds 10 percent to Firefox’s start-up time. But that’s only for the average extension; some add-ons have a much worse start-up time impact than others.

To encourage add-on developers to consider this performance hit and optimize their add-ons, Mozilla has started testing the 100 most popular Firefox add-ons and releasing a weekly-updated listof their impact on browser start-up time. Here is a“rogue’s gallery” of the 10 add-ons with the worst impact on start-up time:

1. FoxLingo– Translator / Dictionary
2. Firebug
3. AniWeather
4. FlashGot
5. FoxClocks
6. FoxyTunes
7. Video DownloadHelper
8. FastestFox– Browse Faster
9. Xmarks Sync
10. SimilarWeb– Find the Best Sites on the Internet

The two worst-performing add-ons in the list, FoxLingo and Firebug, add a whopping 76 percent each to Firefox’s start-up time.

As well as publishing the slow add-ons list, Mozilla will also be adding warnings to the Add-On Gallery listing of any add-on that slows Firefox’s start-up time by 25 percent or more. TheMozilla effort to improve add-on performanceis not just about“naming and shaming” poor performing add-ons, though,  Mozilla is also providing assistance to developers to optimize add-ons by updating its performance best practices documentation, and by releasing tools to help developers test their products.

The availability of a wide range of useful extensions is one of the reasons I use Firefox; Icompiled a list of my favorites here. But Mozilla’s testing data shows that it’s good idea to regularly review the add-ons you have installed and disable those you no longer or rarely use, particularly if they appear on the list of the worst offenders above. Disabling an add-on stops Firefox from loading it, so it will no longer affect start-up time, but keeps the add-on in your add-on manager list so it can be re-enabled when you need it. Firebug, for example, is a really useful debugging tool, but I only use it very occasionally, so from now on I’m going to keep it disabled.

PhotocourtesyFlickr userPhoto Monkey

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HyperOffice: One-Stop Collaboration: Online Collaboration«

Most remote teams rely on several solutions to fulfill all of their collaborations needs: email and communication, project management, database management and group meetings, just to name a few.HyperOfficeoffers distributed teams the benefit of all essential business tools in a single collaboration suite, as well as mobile capabilities for today’s remote workforce.

Communication

• Business email.Companies can set up their own branded emails (users@company.com) using theHyperOffice webmail modulethat includes a variety of features, such as folders, email rules, tabs, search, flags, and spam- and virus-filtering.
• Outlook synchronization. For those users who prefer to use Outlook, HyperOffice offers the abilities to access and manage an Outlook account on any PC, Mac, or mobile device, and all changes are automatically synched, updated, and mirrored.
• Push email.Thepush email and mobile synccapabilities of HyperOffice allow users to push and sync email, contacts, calendars and tasks with almost every major mobile device, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, and Nokia, and since HyperOffice is a team platform, users can use their mobiles phones to sync with a shared group calendar that updates all other team members of updates and changes.

Collaboration

• Document management.Users canstore and organize documents onlineand are able to apply multiple levels of permissions. HyperOffice also includes collaboration features like versioning, comments, audit trails and change notifications. Users can also conduct full-text searches and allow other users to access, manage, and upload documents from their own desktops with easy drag-and-drop functionality.
• Project management.Project management is an important aspect of managing distributed teams, and withHyperoffice’s project management module, managers and business owners are able to control multiple projects across multiple teams. Users can create projects and tasks, set timelines, and track progress, and every user gets a to-do list of assigned tasks. For more sophisticated projects, task dependencies are available, as well as interactive Gantt charts to allow users to manage tasks visually.
• Intranet/Extranet workspaces.HyperOffice includes a drag-and-drop intranet publisher that allows users to create customized workspaces for their groups and teams.
• Calendars and contacts.Shared group calendars let teams manage their schedules with such features as color coding and meeting invites, and with shared address books, users can manage and share contacts across the team.

In addition to these features, HyperOffice also offers wikis, surveys, forums, notes, and reminders to help teams collaborate and share information in real time.

Workflows

• HyperBase.HyperOffice includesHyperBase, a simple web form and online database tool that lets users create simple database applications to automate common workflows, such as lead tracking and order processing.

Online Meetings

• HyperMeeting.Users also have the option of using HyperOffice’s web conferencing platform, HyperMeeting, which includes features such as shared presentations, audio conferencing, instant messaging, and file sharing.

Integration

• Interlinked data.Every piece of data within the HyperOffice system can be“interlinked” with any other piece of data, which allows users to create context around particular transactions or people. For example, relevant documents and email records can be attached to a calendar event for an important meeting, or documents, projects, calendar events, forum discussions, and surveys can be attached to a particular contact. Another example is the email-to-tasks feature, where users can create a task out of an email with a single click.

The best thing aboutHyperOfficeis that it combines all collaboration tools into one solution, helping to avoid theweb app patchwork quilt problem(GigaOM Pro link, sub. req.) and keeping remote teams organized and working effectively.

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Back to the (Office of the) Future: Online Collaboration«

Over the years, there have been numerous articles musing on what the office of the future would look like, but how have those past predictions matched up to reality today?

Back in 1975,BusinessWeekpublished“an in-depth analysis of how word processing will reshape the corporate office.”In the article, industry experts were divided over whether they would be able“to call up documents” from their files on-screen and connect electronic terminals to each other or if this vision of the future was, in fact, “scare talk.” One of the biggest concerns raised was how word processing would change the traditional secretary-executive relationship.

I think it’s safe to say that the predictions in the article put forward by George E. Pake , then head of Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, were largely correct. According to Pake, in 1995, there would be a TV-display terminal with a keyboard sitting at his desk and he’d be “able to call updocuments from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button… I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy {printed paper} I’ll want in this world.”

I have it on good authority from Jonathan Howell, Huddle’s CTO, that in the 1990s, everything was networked, all internal communication was done via email on a mainframe and desktop printers (with“desktop” referring to ubiquity rather than size) were commonplace. However, Jonathan was working for IBM in the 90s; what was it like for the rest of the workforce? You could indeed access your files with a click of a button on your computer. Networked desktop PCs were becoming increasingly widespread in offices worldwide, and in August 1995, Microsoft launched its much-anticipated Windows 95. The World Wide Web started to take shape, and Yahoo became one of the largest directories for web content. In short, advances in technology during the 1990s resulted in the“revolution in the office” that Pake predicted.Laptop computers were also becoming hot sellers, so the idea of a mobile workforce, while still a long way off, was starting to develop.

However, Paks’s vision of a world without“hard copy” remains a fantasy. In spite of the increasing popularity of email and the web, the rise of devices such as the iPad and enterprise content management tools, such asHuddleand SharePoint, the paperless office is still out of reach. The desktop printers that became a familiar sight in the office in the’90s continue to be the worker’s trusty companion. According to theWWF, the average U.S. officeworker goes through 10,000 sheets of copy paper per year. People still want to have physical documentation. Whether it’s business records, receipts or utility bills, people continue to feel they need to store paperwork in a safe, physical place for future reference. To drive widespread adoption of new technologies, a cultural shift and change in habits needs to take place. Just as the introduction of word processing and automation to the 1990s office changed the traditional secretary-executive relationship (or“office wife” bond), enterprise content management and collaboration technologies aredisrupting the way people work today. Transforming working practices takes time.

In 1987, little more than 10 years afterBusinessWeek’s predictions article was published,Apple Computer created a videoenvisioning how people would use technology to work in the 21st century:

The touchscreen“Knowledge Navigator” tablet device shown in the video could easily pass for an early prototype of Apple’s iPad, while the University Research Network accessed for information on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest looks suspiciously like the web. We are now accustomed to seeing touchscreen devices— according to market research firm iSuppli, worldwide production of touchscreen modules for use in computers is set to hit117.9 million units in 2014— but in 1987, mainstream adoption of such devices was still years away.

Another application shown is video conferencing: The professor is seen happily conversing with his colleague on-screen. Now, of course, video conferencing is part of most workers’ everyday lives, whether they are based at home or in an office: another hit for Apple’s vision of the future. While I doubt avatars with bow ties fielding calls and managing diaries will take off (unlessClippy2.0 is overdue?), but virtual customer service assistants are now a familiar sight:Jenn at Alaska AirlinesandLucy at O2, for example. It may be a while beforespeech recognition is as seamlessas that shown in the video; it is still a familiar (albeit often frustrating) technology.

The paperless office and a diary-managing avatar may not be a reality just yet, but many of the predictions made decades ago aren’t too far off the mark. However, there were some visions of the office of the future that just didn’t come to fruition, such as the short-livedMicrosoft at Work(MAW). On June 9, 1993, Bill Gates launched MAW, which was supposed to connect common business machinery, like fax machines and photocopiers, with a communications protocol allowing control and status information to be shared with computers running Windows. It never got off the ground, and by 1995, it had disappeared from view.

Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and EVP Strategy atHuddle, can be reached on Twitter@Bandrew.

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Can Bookkeeping Be Handled Remotely?: Online Collaboration«

There are many job roles that simply don’t seem to work outside of the office, at least at first glance. For example, consider the role of your bookkeeper or accountant. It seems like, at the very least, they would need to come in on a regular basis to take care of paperwork, whether you’re talking about cutting checks to vendors or handling payroll. However, with some planning and the use of the right tools, bookkeeping is a task that can be done remotely.

Handling Hard Copy

The biggest difficulty with either outsourcing your accounting department entirely or letting them telecommute is that there are more pieces of physical paperwork in the accounting department than in any other part of the office. Checks, receipts, tax forms and other paperwork build up and someone will have to deal with all of it.

But if you’re willing to make a commitment to reducing all that hard copy, it’s possible. Services such asShoeboxedcan automate the process of scanning in your organization’s receipts and putting them in a form that a virtual bookkeeper can handle easily. It may just be a matter of adjusting how your mailroom operates: Invoices, receipts and other such paperwork needs to be scanned and then filed. It’s a simple transition, although it may take a little work to set up.

There is a question of security— you don’t want your employees’ tax forms floating around the Internet— so you’ll need to ensure you use a secure system.

Outsourcing Accounting Functions

Moving your bookkeeper and other accounting staff out of your office isn’t necessarily that difficult proposition, but a question of location will come up if you want to outsource. Increasingly, firms are offering extremely inexpensive accounting and tax preparation services using staff based in countries such as India and the Philippines. Such outsourcing may be less effective for financial work than for other parts of your business, however. When it comes to your company’s finances, it’s important to make sure that you’re working with a staff deeply familiar with the regulations in the U.S. (or wherever you’re based). It’s even better if you can find someone up to speed on your state’s requirements. Otherwise, come tax time, you can find yourself facing a lot of trouble. There are enough ways for a problem to creep into your taxes that it just doesn’t make sense to add the potential problems of working with someone who isn’t local.

It comes down to striking a balance, if you want your accounting staff to be able to telecommute or if you want to let someone outside your company entirely handle the function. Payroll firms and other specialist companies make it easy to outsource the process, but you’ll still want to make sure that you’re working with a local team, even if you never see them face-to-face.

PhotocourtesyFlickr userLe Petite Poulailler

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How Better Tweeting Builds Staff Engagement: Online Collaboration«

Yahoo’s release of Twitter usage statistics,reported earlier this week by Mathew Ingram, presents some interesting pointers for organizations striving to build strong social media presences.

The research focused on the ways influence is established through Twitter, hinting at which user categories are the most popular, as well as which provide value, and how.

While businesses can apply this information to tweak their interactions with clients, customers and the public via Twitter, the research points to much more than that: It implies that greater benefits are available to companies that use Twitter to actively engage with their own team members: companies that stop seeing Twitter as an outward-focused medium, and customers as a separate audience from staff.

A Culture of Public Collaboration

How many of your staff members actively follow— that is, engage with— your company’s Twitter feed? How many staff members’ Twitter accounts are actively followed (or engaged with)byyour company’s Twitter feed?

According to the Yahoo study,“Organizations… devote a surprisingly small fraction of their attention to business-related news.” Other user categories didn’t behave like this, though. It reported that, for example, bloggers:

• retweet valuable URLs from a range of relevant categories, noting that“{In-Tweet URLs} originated by bloggers tend to be overrepresented among long-lived URLs.”
• act“as recyclers and filters of information.”
• consume large amounts of information, acting as intermediaries between the media and other users.

Do those who run your company’s Twitter account see staff as peer sources of valuable information that can be recycled for the company’s broader following?

This approach has the potential to benefit the company among internal audiences, as well as those in the public space. At its most basic, actively engaging with staff members within the public space provided by Twitter reflects the value of the staff to the company.

It reinforces to team members themselves— as well as customers and clients— that the company regards its staff as thought leaders, and while this approach can’t create a culture on its own, it can support a culture in which team members are actively recognized.

The“intermediary layer” alluded to above comprises about 500,000 Twitter users, according to Yahoo’s research, and only 4 percent of them are among the“elite” 0.05 percent of users who attract half the attention of the Twittersphere. Your company doesn’t need to be Lady Gaga to lead opinions on Twitter. But to take advantage of the intermediary layer, it does need to actively engage with peers (including staff members), filter information and retweet the good stuff.

It also needs to do that consistently. More than 270 URLs were initiated by bloggers per capita, according to the research. (By comparison, the average organization generated an average of 104 URLs per capita.)  To approach a significant level of value, your corporate Twitter team needs to consume a lot of relevant media; either direct from the source, or from other opinion leaders, including your staff.

Twitter and the Corporate Blog

If your organization has a blog, you’ll likely be tying your Twitter strategy into that, so if you’re planning to improve the value of your Twitter interactions, using them to engage with staff as well as clients, you might need to apply that same approach to the corporate blog, too. Do your staff members actively engage with the corporate blog, not just as contributors, but as audience members?

While many company blogs like to take the company line, apply the company style guide, and adopt a semi-corporate tone, some of the tried-and-tested blogging advice— writing“on the level,” telling stories, using anecdotes, and revealing a human side— may help companies tobuild credibility amongalltheir audiences.

It’s one thing to have a team member draft a blog post; it’s another to see your staff daily accessing the company blog—perhaps via their Twitter feeds—then making comments, retweeting links to posts, and so on.

The company blog can be a particularly appropriate way to keep staff informed of the work of other parts of the business, and aware of the relationships the company has with its followers—provided the blog, like the company Twitter feed, is authentic, and successfully treats all its followers as collaborators, rather than“staff” and“customers”.

Does your company treat staff and clients as separate audiences? How well does it engage and collaborate with both groups through the company Twitter feed and blog?

Photocourtesy stock.xchng usera_kartha.

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