As some of you may know, our team at Advizo is furiously working on a new service that lets people get advice from the best community out there. In this post I wanted to provide a little of the context for why we started on this project.
Often times, people don't want a Wikipedia page or some other static content that describes a solution. They really want advice that they can personalize and interact with. In other words, people want other people to empathize and support them. It ranges from finding a community of T-Bone Burnett fans to discuss his latest productions or to finding medical community of fellow disease sufferers that helps you understand your medical condition better. Information is not enough - we get bombarded by it by the nanosecond. What we need is some way to humanize it so we can relate to it and make it ours.
Here's a great personal example of this: we were perusing AskMeHelpDesk.com (which by the way I manage), and came across a question posted by someone looking for good food ideas for someone on a low budget. However, looking at this discussion about good recipes to help this individual, we came across a post that had a mole recipe. Within the context of this discussion, this recipe stood out so we decided to try it later in the week (tasty recipe!). Now, we have several cookbooks at home, some of them with mole recipes but neither my wife nor I have ever made mole. Why did we suddenly get the inspiration? Here's my theory: while having the authoritative recipe books are great, getting it in context from a fellow human makes the same recipe suddenly more meaningful, accessible and real. This is the true power of communities - a place where information is transformed into personalized knowledge and advice by virtue of the connecting that knowledge with the person delivering it.
Yes, maybe the messenger is as important as the message.
