What do marketers need to know about Quora?

Culture!  It's early days for Quora and, yet, there is a very strong culture here. 

Study it. Absorb it. Preserve it. Respect it.

Quora is a site for connoisseurship and individuality and, by extension, has fair amount of healthy ego.

Interactions here are largely driven by a pursuit of excellence, depth, expertise, context, wit and personality. There is a very low noise ratio here -- at present. People take the questions and answers very seriously. It is very self-regulated -- simple standards like proper grammar meant to uphold quality. The value of the "discourse" is high level. You will learn a lot from people who are in the front lines of their fields.

And the community (Quommunity) is legitimately quite nervous about the influx of users (How did Quora suddenly start getting many more users around the beginning of 2011?, or Lucretia M Pruitt's Welcome to Quora. Do Yourself a Favor & Slow Down.).

The community here still skews to the tech sector, but with the recent growth, I have noted a broadening of the participants.

So, tips for marketers:

• Understand how Quora works: You'll make more friends by working to preserve the culture. If you can do that and execute a strategy, you'll go farther.
• Tread softly: Overt marketing here is not tolerated, in the same way other web communities frown upon promotion. If a brand story is relevant to a thread, a case study might be appropriate to the discussion. But cut the rah rah and keep to the salient points. Avoid getting down voted or collapsed.
• Quora isn't corporate: So far, there are no corporate accounts. The individual is the currency here.
• Value expertise: There are really smart people here. Very few yobs. A number of bona fide stars. Thought leadership can be built here.
• Build expert profiles: If you or your client is expert in a field, this is the place to prove it. Be generous by sharing real insights. Stay open to dissenters and contrarians.
• Reporters mine it for stories: Quora Community: Who are the journalists on Quora?. There are cases of answers being published, with credit, as op-eds (verbatim) in other media platforms.
• CEO access is unrivaled: I'm not aware of many other platforms that provide such a direct CEO-consumer link.
• Quora answers are indexed: And searchable on Google, et al.

Watch how the Quora community develops. Negative commentary or criticism leveled at participants (like Mark Zuckerberg, for example) is modest so far -- but that will like change as the community broadens. There has been some brand scuffling like Facebook Vs Google. Certainly, that's an issue to manage going forward.

Bottom line -- play by the rules -- written and unwritten. 

Quora is unique and the real prize is cultivating the community and meeting your marketing goals. I'm sure there will, one day, be a thread exploring the marketing success stories on Quora.