Hearst Launches 'Q&A Communities' on Its Teen-Oriented Web Sites
Answerology platform allows users to ask and answer questions anonymously.
Hearst Digital Media officially launched this week two "Q&A communities" on Seventeen.com and CosmoGirl.com in which users can ask and receive answers to questions anonymously using the company’s Answerology platform.
Teens who register to “Get Advice!” on Seventeen.com and/or “Ask It” on CosmoGirl.com can ask questions and get advice on fashion, health, beauty, dating and more from their peers as well as from a group of experts, such as Hearst editors and subject professionals. Users can also be designated as “expert peers” based on a rating system used to evaluate and rank an answer to a question.
The Answerology platform ensures that every question is filtered and moderated for content. More serious questions about sexual health, for example, are routed to subject professionals. If the filter is triggered, a community moderator steps in to review and monitor the conversation.
Hearst acquired Answerology.com, which was founded in 2005, last year and its platform was quietly rolled out to the company’s adult-oriented Web sites, including Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping and Redbook.
Milner says that Hearst was trying to find a unique way to introduce social media into their brands. “Hearst realized that they weren’t going to be the company to create a Facebook, a MySpace or a Twitter,” Matt Milner, founder of Answerology and VP, social media, Hearst Magazines Digital Media, told AD. “So their goal was to ‘socialize’ their existing properties, or in other words, to take their Web sites and let users start interacting with it. These platforms allow users to answer each others questions and connect with people that are relevant to them in a trusted environment.”
Milner added that the platforms are attractive to advertisers because they can experiment with social media with a company they trust. “A lot of advertisers are concerned about inappropriate adjacency when it comes to some of these social networks,” he says. “They're wondering what people are going to say next to their ads, but they trust brands like Cosmo, and Answerology allows them to be in the flow of what our users are doing.”
The quiet rollout on MarieClaire.com and other sites in 2008, Milner says, met their expectations, but he declined to give specifics. However, since launching the platforms on Seventeen.com and CosmoGirl.com, Milner says that more that 10 percent of overall traffic has been going to “Get Advice!” and “Ask It,” and by the end of February, the communities became the #1 and #2 most visited sections of Seventeen.com and CosmoGirl.com, respectively. He declined to say how many users are registered to these communities.
Milner says that the company has plans to publish a book based on the user-generated content from “Get Advice!” and “Ask It” as well as allow advertisers to answer user questions.
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