Quora & LinkedIn Competing for the Q&A Job [Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio]

In the first episode of the Jobs-To-Be-Done radio show, Doug talks with Bob and Chris about how LinkedIn and Quora compete for the job of getting questions answered online.

The discussion includes some tactial-level ideas on how LinkedIn could better understand the job, and how the timeline of consideration and consumption could be constructed using Jobs-To-Be-Done interviews.

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Next week we’ll discuss 5 Hour Energy Drink, and the challenges that come with targeting a ritualistic job (morning coffee).

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All right this is Doug Crets and I am bringing you live this Re-Wired Radio podcast and we’re joined today by Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta who are partners of the Re-Wired Group which is an innovation think tank based in Detroit, Michigan. Chris and Bob, we’re here to talk about Quora and LinkedIn broadly speaking. I guess maybe the clue in the audience here, we had talked at some point last week about what is the difference really between Quora and LinkedIn and why does it seem that Quora is so much better at bringing people together and sharing viewpoints?

Why don’t we start with Chris? Chris, you and I started this out and we actually went to Quora and we actually asked this question and we got one answer. The guy, Fred Landis, said it was because LinkedIn is about 100% promotion, self-promotion, and Quora promotes ideas. Do you buy into that? Why don’t you just share with us your viewpoint?

Chris:                       I kind of buy into it. Let’s do a little bit more background. I think the listeners might be interested.

Doug:                       Yeah.

Chris:                       I think the conversation was pretty cool between you and I when we were at the          Re-Wired offices in Detroit. It was mostly about were trying to share as much information about Jobs-To-Be-Done as we can. So we started the LinkedIn group and got a ton of members that joined right away. I think we were both pretty impressed that people did join the group.

Doug:                       Yeah.

Chris:                       And then we tried to seed it with discussion, it kind of fell flat. Anytime we wrote a blog post, we put it up there and said, “Hey, what you guys think about this?” And just crickets.

It’s like there’s a bunch of people looking at this and nobody really engaging and participating, which is weird because we know people want to talk about this.

On a whim we kind of started the Quora discussion more just prompted by people asking questions on Quora and us grouping them together on one topic. It seems like it just took off to the races immediately.

That kind of prompted us to have this discussion. It seems like all the professionals are obviously on LinkedIn. They hang-out there. They update their profile. They engage, but we can’t get discussions going.

What are the kind of critical differences between these two platforms that make Quora really powerful for discussion and LinkedIn fall flat? I like the answer that you just read, or that we received.

I actually had a conversation with another colleague at lunch who is kind of a social media maiden. I posed the same question. He had a similar answer in that he said he thinks people like platforms on the web that are singularly focused.

That comment to me has a number of pitfalls, but when I boil it back so he wasn’t speaking in jobs language, I almost want to say I think people like platforms on the web that do a particular job for them. I think that is what we’re here to talk about. Somebody wanted to chime in. Bob?

Bob:                          If you think about it, there’s, I’ll say, a pretty complex notion of who is giving and who is receiving. If you think about LinkedIn and all the people who signed up, they have hired it to be in the stream, but not to contribute to the stream.

LinkedIn is one of those things that’s like, “keep me connected, keep me up to date, keep me what’s going on.”

Doug:                       Yeah.

Bob:                          For the most part if you have a question you don’t go to LinkedIn to say, “I want to ask this question out there.”

Some people are doing that and it’s working okay but for the most part it is the self-promotion. You need to be able to ask questions people can answer. It’s more about people try to promote what they know, as opposed to Quora is really about, to me, “I don’t know about this. Let me go there and see if I can find somebody who’s willing to help me with it.”

I think, Chris, to your point of it being very focused, it’s like when you have a platform that does multiple jobs, the thing is they are always going to be vulnerable of somebody who’s going to be focused on the singular job and can do it on one dimension differently. It’s because Quora is more focused on, “help me find an answer to a question I have,” even though LinkedIn can do it, it’s not the primary job of what it does. It does a lot of different things.

It’s stealing share, more or less, from LinkedIn. Quora is stealing share from LinkedIn only in the context of, I think, it gets back to consideration set up when you’re thinking about the problem or you’re saying, “I need to get some help answering this.”

Yahoo! Answers, to be honest, is one of those things that I think was a really great platform but it just went so down market in terms of going after the kids and helping that side of it. I think Quora is the business version of Yahoo! Answers. It’s like, “I’ve got a question and somebody is going to help me.”

Doug:                       If I could jump in then, Bob, do you think that actually Quora could actually answer the other job-to-be-done with what LinkedIn is trying to get done for people? Which is, “I need business networking.”

Bob:                          I think that, again, it can overlap because at some point you are connecting. “Who is this person who answered the question, and what’s their credentials?” My belief is that people are going from Quora to answer the question and then jumping back to LinkedIn to say, “Who are they and should I connect with them?”

I think they’re actually synergistic but if you think about the initiation of it. The initial job is, “I have a question and I’d like an expert to help me with it,” again LinkedIn still has the, I’ll say, the overall persona around it is a networking and job site where you can put your resume up there. I don’t think people are thinking about it as a serious idea exploration platform.

Chris:                       We’ve highlighted I think what is an interesting challenge for platform managers and strategists.

Doug:                       Right.

Chris:                       I think it’s a pretty common conversation that occurs when you talk to people in the web world around new features. Not to simplify it too much but you could almost imagine the conversations that occurred at a platform like LinkedIn. Where it’s like, we have all the professionals in the world have a profile on LinkedIn. What’s the next logical step? Let’s get them to engage with each other. Let’s get them to ask each other questions. Let’s get them to join groups and to communicate with each other more.

Because of what Bob is saying, “What enters the consideration set when people want to engage?” you get this against the grain sort of feeling. I think they had this huge push around LinkedIn Questions but because it wasn’t in the consideration set when somebody needed to have something answered, even if it was the central location for all the professionals, people weren’t going and engaging.

I know they did get some engagement. I think it’s fallen off when you compare it to Quora, but it is a huge pitfall that I think platform managers need to avoid because it’s such an easy thing to connect at a high level. We have everybody here, of course we’re going to try to get them to engage in new ways.

I think it could be the demise. If you start to look at all the dollars spent and resources allocated to try to get people to engage in that new way, even though it seems ancillary and a close cousin, you can end up spending a lot of money building out features that you just get no adoption in.

Bob:                          To me this brings the importance of understanding both the platform and the brand side of it. I’m a big fan of David Aaker’s stuff where he talks about the brand architecture.

The whole thing is that I could see LinkedIn either an endorser brand or an ingredient brand to Quora. It’s like Quora powered by LinkedIn.

As you think about Quora as answering the question and the thing is when you try to make the brand do too many things it literally blurs the lines of what consideration it goes into. Is it really going to do what I want it to do? It’s like the Swiss Army knife. It does so many things but I need something that’s really going to be a lot better than that. I need a screwdriver.

Doug:                       Yeah.

Bob:                          You know the Swiss Army knife has a screwdriver, but you know I need… If you are really going to build a platform you need to think about if the jobs are different and whether you need to have the endorser brand, the driver brand, the descriptor brand, or the ingredient brand.

You need to figure out how to play that out so in the consumer’s mind when they have the job they can put the right image or brand in their head to say, “Do I go to Quora, or do I go to Yahoo! Answers?”

It’s like, “Well, no, I’m not going to go to LinkedIn,” and again, I think that jobs is all about how people make decisions to make progress.

Doug:                       Yeah

Bob:                          The branding is the shorthand of how they consider things.

Platforms start small or new products or new things start small and they try to add features. They actually whittle themselves out of the market and they don’t even know it. It happens in consumer package goods. It happens in all these different industries as well, but I think…

Doug:                       Yeah.

Bob:                          … you’re starting to see that where as platforms gets so big. When I say AOL it’s like, “Oh my god, is that antiquated?”

Doug:                       Well, let me jump in and throw a little bit of a curveball here. We were going to talk about Quora and LinkedIn but, Bob, your comments made me think about Yahoo!. What about this portal approach? Yahoo! as a portal was really the sort of frontier of the web.

Now we’re moving into a space where it’s basically the ab space. We have Foursquare now we have. We have Instagram. What happens to a Yahoo! that’s really always trying to be all things to all people because, “suck everyone into the web.”

Bob:                          Right. That’s a great question. To be honest there’s many, many examples of this.

Doug:                       Yeah.

Bob:                          It’s like the big company that literally gets eaten one bite at a time by people who make it easier, more convenient, or cheaper on the dimensions of value that literally it becomes where the only people left are the people who appreciate, “I only have one place to go which is Yahoo!.” The fact is Yahoo! keeps spreading their resources thinner and thinner and they add features as opposed to make the features better and eventually it just collapses.

Think of it as this big cookie that everybody’s taken a little bite of that eventually there’s nothing left. They literally are running around in circles trying to solve because they are reacting to everybody else’s strategy except for their own.

Doug:                       Bob, let’s get back to Quora and LinkedIn for just one second. We’ve had countless conversations over the past couple of months basically people coming up to us saying, “The Jobs-To-Be-Done theory is obviously powerful. I understand the theory. I’ve read all the articles. I get the milkshake story. Give me the tactical level steps that I need to go execute it.”

Bob:                          Yeah.

Doug:                       It’s like I’m up to my ears in theory. Let’s play it out. We don’t have to get really deep but put yourself in the seat of the platform manager at LinkedIn. How do you approach it using the “Jobs-To-Be-Done” framework? Do you attempt to understand the job of the question-and-answer?

Are you trying to make a decision whether to play there with LinkedIn or if there is another that LinkedIn could do? Who do you interview? What do you go do?

Bob:                          The first thing to me is we don’t talk about what people want like, “Tell me what you would like in a question-and-answer platform.” “I’d like it to be easy to post. I’d like it too easy to sign in.” You get all that kind of crap.

You need to talk to people about what they do now and where they struggle.

The first thing is, Chris, you and I would build a protocol around recruiting people, to tell us about, “Tell me about the last time you posted on Quora.” Right?

Chris:                       Yeah.

Bob:                          Find people to tell us the story. It starts from, “When did you have the first thought about…?”

I should go to Quora and ask that. You want to get the first thought and then you want to walk through how long did they have the thought before they actually did something about it?

What was in the consideration set when they actually went there? What was the experience when they finished it up? It’s not like customer satisfaction survey where you are looking back on the experience. You’re trying to make sure you capture the “going in” view of what were they thinking about, what were they valuing, and how did they choose.

In a lot of occasions people can have value that they didn’t anticipate in the experience and the reality is it won’t help them choose that one necessarily next time. You want to understand how they are choosing ultimately.

Chris:                       So, how…

Bob:                          Go ahead.

Chris:                       How far back? We always talk about the drawing of the timeline and slowing down the consideration and moment of choice.

If you are interviewing somebody and you put the pen in the timeline and you say, “Okay, this is the moment that I first thought about, I’m going to consider posting a question on Quora.” How far back can you go before that moment to figure out, “When did you first have the notion that you needed to answer this question?” Can you go back real far in time or do you need to?

Bob:                          In some cases I would say you would say people would say, “Yeah.” I’ve been asking this question to myself for six months and just talking to people about it.

The whole thing is to get, when did they have the first thought and then when did they articulate it to somebody and then, when did they have, what I call, passive conversation. Then, when did they actively go to seek to go to the next level and what are the events that led up to them wanting to actively seek a new way in which to do it.

My belief is that most people will, and this is from anecdotal (people we’ve talked to), most people have a conversation with somebody else first around the question. When they are not either getting the answer that they want or they want something deeper, they then go to Quora.

At some point in time it’s like, Chris, I call you and say, “Hey, what about this?” And it’s sufficient enough, “Yeah, okay.” But it’s at something where it’s like, “I want a little broader perspective.” It’s that bigger picture or “I didn’t get the answer I thought” or “I want to double check.”

Part of it is understanding the reasons why they go to Quora. I believe it’s really the extension of the conversation you would have with somebody that now you are opening it up to the audience.

I think in LinkedIn’s terms though, if you read the question, the questions in LinkedIn are more scaled questions. They’re almost like I feel like they’re trapped. You know what I mean? “Hey, who knows about Jobs-To-Be-Done,” and what they are trying to do is get people to comment on it so then they can comment more about it. You know?

Chris:                       Yeah.

Bob:                          There are consistency issues around it where I feel that because LinkedIn being like we talked about earlier, being a promotional thing, it’s trying to understand the genuineness of the question and the genuineness of the answers.

The key is being able to get people to talk about what they posted and what else they would have considered. If Quora wasn’t available what would they have used? Would they have actually used anything? What’s the progress they are trying to make when they’re posting it?

It’s like, “Now you get these answers, what are you going to do with it?” Does it make them feel better? Is it that they can do something different? Again, everybody’s hiring it for different reasons, emotional, social, and physical reasons.

Chris:                       So, Bob, if someone is actually using this Jobs-To-Be-Done approach, how do you identify for them when, as they are doing this research, they have actually picked a moment when someone has actually hired something? How do you define that moment of choice where they’re moving towards getting that progress? How does that flag for someone who might be looking for this stuff? What does that look like?

Bob:                          The starting point is always about, “Tell me about the last time you…” And then you fill in the blank.

You try to make sure that you’re thinking about you’ve got a consideration set. As you start to have people tell you stories, and it’s about collecting the stories, and then analyzing the stories from a motivational and a drive and an energy drive perspective. You start to realize that as you pile the stories up you realize that there are patterns in it.

To be honest I started as broad as, “Tell me about the last time you posted on Quora,” to “Tell me about the last time…” There’s two sides of it. “When’s the last time you posted a question on Quora?” To “Tell me about the last time you actually contributed to Quora?” To “Tell me about the last time you posted on LinkedIn?”

To me, as you hear the stories and the consideration sets, you start to broaden your horizon of, “Tell me about the last time you…” Again, what you are looking for are the moments where they struggle and where they had an expectation and it wasn’t… Where they hired something and it didn’t do what they wanted it to do. That’s where the opportunity and the innovation exist.

Chris:                       I think one other important thing to point out is, even if… We’re kind of constructing a job’s interview protocol as we talk through this. This is how it naturally happens. One thing that it brought to mind is even if you seed the timeline with a question like, “Tell me the last time you posted a question to Quora or LinkedIn.” As you go back in time you will still capture the entire consideration set.

It will be, “I tried Yahoo! Answers and I thought about e-mailing my buddy in San Francisco and I thought about posting on an expert forum and getting…” Even though you start halfway down to make sure that you’ve got people who are participating and you are interviewing the right people, you’ll get this huge slot of different things that they consider pulling in that our competitors to something like Quora and LinkedIn.

I just think that’s an important thing to point out.

Doug:                       Why is that important, Chris?

Chris:                       It gets back to cross category competition. A lot of times when you get down to the strategy we always talk about Snickers and Milky Way. It’s that when you look at buying media and designing products and way things compete, I’m going to CPG for some weird reason, everybody views it as these two items are similar so they compete with each other.

A lot of times you will lose important dimensions of value because you’re not really truly understanding all the different things that could do this job for this person. Quora needs to be acutely aware, like Bob said, they’re competing with a phone call between the three of us, or the two of us.

Doug:                       Yeah.

Chris:                       They’re competing with an e-mail that I send out to 10 of my friends and I say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. What you think about this?” I mean there are a million ways you can go and get information.

If you’re just looking at LinkedIn Questions Answers and Yahoo! Answers, those are my two big competitors. I need to compete with them on features and we need to be developing faster than them. That’s a dangerous road to go down. You’re really narrowing your scope.

Bob:                          The key is not that you want to compete with e-mail but the reality is, “Where are they using e-mail and it’s not working? Why is it not working? What else would they consider? What would be a better choice?”

It’s finding those moments of struggling that’s the key. The thing is most people say, “Well, it’s too broad. We can’t compete with Microsoft Outlook.” That’s not the point. It’s finding the chink in the armor that says, “This is doing this really well and they’ve literally innovated to try to use it to do something and it’s not doing it.”

The fundamental belief is that consumers innovate all the time. We need to understand where they are struggling and their hiring thing and it’s not doing the job. But they didn’t expect it to do the job in the first place.

Chris:                       I’m glad you made that point of clarification. The other thing I think that’s important to point out, ongoing little bit off-topic though, I think it’s also possible for Quora to develop themselves into the same quandary that LinkedIn might be in right now if they decide to compete directly with LinkedIn.

Bob brought up the important aspect of, the questions that are posted on LinkedIn feel really pitchy all the time. “Who knows about CRM?” Then people pile on. The same thing as possible, If LinkedIn would decide to say, “Hey, we got all these people contributing and answering questions. Why don’t we become the next business profile website?”

It’s very possible for them to end up in the same place where, “Now I have everybody participating on Quora really populating their profiles and making that a powerful page.” Then you’ve connected things in people’s minds as far as, “Hey, I can go spam this community now. Now that everybody can see my information on Quora, why don’t I pull some questions that are really tightly related to exactly what I’m selling and seed the community that way?”

You could see the quality of the Quora question-and-answer community deteriorate drastically if they ended up in that same spot. I just think that’s another important thing to think about.

Doug:                       Okay. We have time really for one more question. I guess what I wanted to throw out there is, going back to Quora and LinkedIn, would it be okay for you guys to share with us what is the job that Quora is getting done for you personally? And, in which one of those two are you more engaged? Are you spending more time in LinkedIn or are you spending more time in Quora?

Chris:                       Go ahead, Bob.

Bob:                          To me, LinkedIn, I hire it for very different reasons than answering questions. There’s a couple of platforms for me. One is it’s just about seeing what’s happening in my professional network. I’m on LinkedIn probably more than I am on Facebook or any other platform. Just trying to see what’s going on? What’s moving? What are people reading? What people in my network are reading? It’s the pulse of my network.

At the same time, there are one or two forums which are groups that I will interact with, and to be honest, they’re more hobby-based. One is the Robust Design Engineering one and it’s more that I have a lot of experience in that area and I want to share. It’s more where I will answer questions there than I will post anything.

Quora on the other hand is if I want to be able to help refine my idea. I’m hiring it to help me make my ideas better. I’m putting things out there. I find that I get better, more professional answers, more thought-provoking answers from Quora.

I have probably hired LinkedIn twice with questions and I just feel like I’m getting sale guys answering me. I have literally fired it for anything where I’m trying to develop an idea or get some background on something. Quora seems to be so much more genuine. People aren’t trying to sell me, they’re genuinely trying to help. It’s not really good to say it that way.

Doug:                       I can echo that same, with regards to LinkedIn I think I’m pretty close as well. I think I am most active actually in a group of professionals that are all cigar smokers, jJust because I own another business in that space.

My interaction there is, I will say, pretty sales pitchy. So people are asking questions and I’m throwing my answer in and I’m not expecting a whole lot of really powerful dialogue going back and forth. I am participating just because I think people are reading it and pulling it off.

Quora on the other hand, I will say I am more of an “answerer” than I am an “asker.” So people will have pretty specific Jobs-To-Be-Done questions about execution and theory and that sort of thing. I will participate in that. It does the job of shaping up ideas for me just because I have to formulate what I think is a clear and reasonable answer to these people’s questions that always forces me to challenge my way of thinking as I answer.

I will say that I have lot higher expectation with Quora. I know when I post, people are going to pick apart. They’re going to write back with something either challenging it or adding to it.

Bob:                          Right.

Doug:                       It really is powerful from that idea shaping aspect.

Bob:                          It’s a higher standard. It’s almost like if you put too simple of a question out there, “Okay, I’m going to get lambasted for that.” It’s almost like you’re going to your peer group at Quora where I think the other one is more like a subgroup of some sort. I can’t, it’s not easy to articulate.

The whole notion is that, “Wat I do before LinkedIn and Quora?” It was either e-mail are because I am dyslexic, it’s all phone calls. To me it usually was one-on-one conversations with people about these things. Now, literally, what Quora has done has allowed me to vet an idea and have 50 conversations in a couple of days, where I could never do that.

Doug:                       Yeah.

Bob:                          It’s very, very efficient and also the people out there that I would never be able to get on the phone. It’s widened your ability to get perspective faster. It’s faster and easier in which to vet ideas. It’s very, very powerful.

Doug:                       Well, Bob, I know you’re going for a hard wrap-up here because of our time considerations.

Bob:                          Yeah.

Doug:                       I just want to throw in, before we sign off, Bob and I had a pretty interesting conversation early this morning about how Red Bull is competing with… I’m sorry, not Red Bull, 5-hour ENERGY® drink is competing with coffee, and how those jobs are shaping up. We might have a topic for next week’s Re-Wired Podcast. I just wanted to throw that teaser out there for all of the.…

Bob:                          Yeah, I think it’s a good example. So next week let’s plan to talk about how 5-hour ENERGY® is literally going to the places where people struggle to drink their coffee or something else to get that energy. Literally, they have snuck in and stole share from what most people would say are outside the category. Well, they’re not coffee, it’s outside the coffee category and it’s in the drink category.

Literally they found places where people struggle. They literally have come up with a solution and they are now positioning to find other jobs it can do it. It’s very, very interesting.

I think that should be our next topic next time.

Doug:                       Yeah, I totally look forward to it and if anybody actually wants to follow us and keep these conversations going, definitely stop by Quora and type in “Jobs-To-Be-Done” and you’ll get the Jobs-To-Be-Done theory group, which is actually growing quite progressively, pretty fast.

They can always follow Bob on Twitter at “innovative Bob“, that’s one of your Twitter accounts, and they can follow Chris at “@chriscbs” on Twitter. I am @douglascrets on Twitter.

And folks, you could always go to the ReWiregroup.com and follow our blog and also look up information on Jobs-To-Be-Done theory and some of the innovative stuff that Bob and his group is doing in Detroit.

Bob:                          Yeah.

Doug:                       With that we’ re going to close… Go ahead, Bob.

Bob:                          Doug, just that the one that I tweet most on is @bmoesta is the one that I do most. So I don’t do much at InnovativeBob.

Doug:                       Okay, forget that InnovativeBob. It’s at @bmoesta. Right?

Bob:                          Thank you, yep. Thank you. Sorry

Doug:                       Okay. Well, thank you, guys, and we’ll be looking forward to that 5-hour ENERGY® drink versus coffee discussion next week. they’ve hired it