How many times do you have to ask a question before getting the right answer?

I have this special talent of making the strangest leaps when it comes to getting information from Wikipedia. E.g.: I was browsing yesterday for the list of best SF novels ever written. I managed to jump to cereals nutritional facts in less than half an hour and exactly 9 clicks. Yes, I know you’re trying to trace the jumps, but believe me, it takes guts! 🙂 Anyway, this is how I got to an article about the origin of the question mark that made me write this article.

Ever since I became a Community Manager for this Q&A tool, anything related to the subject immediately catches my eye. And I got to thinking….how many times do you have to ask a question before getting the right answer?

Excluding, of course, the rhetorical, the universal or the everyday ones. I’m talking about practical questions that ease communication between groups of people.

I know it’s impossible to find out the exact answer, but what I do know is that without a dedicated tool, valuable time is lost due to repeating it over and over again. That’s why if your organization (be it a team or community) ever faced these kind of problems, you should appreciate a solution that will work as a knowledge sharing tool and implicitly as a time management one.

From my point of view, there are some essential aspects that this kind of tool should offer:

• Find the right person to ask
• Store the correct answer(s) for future use
• Update the information when/if necessary
• Make it friendly and easy to use

Now let me explain to you in few words how Quandora manages all that:

• It’s easier than ever to get to the right person since all the people that are following the tag(s) you used in your questions are notified about your post; the same goes for the knowledge base you used as host for your question. And not only that, but you can also invite specific people to answer by simply introducing their e-mail address
• All the questions and answers are stored. This is how your documentation is created. And using the search box you have access in no time to all the information you are interested about
• Ah, the beauty of crowdsourcing! All the stored information gets naturally updated, so you get protected from obsolete content
• The Q&A format is as scannable as it gets. And, we added fine gamification features to our product so that it keeps everybody in shape, without losing sight of the main purpose.

When you learn something is not because someone else gave you the answer, is because you asked the question. It’s just like in Newton’s third law of motion: for every action there is a reaction.

And now I ask you again: how many times do you have to ask a question before getting the right answer? That would be….only once. If you don’t trust me, Quandora it! 🙂