Here is a breakdown of how to use Quora, Focus and Namesake to enhance your professional reputation.

Quora

I recently wrote about using Quora for getting answers to business-related questions. While I think the quality of conversation on Quora can be good, sometimes you feel like you are posting a question into a big, black hole. Still, with the amount of buzz happening around the site, getting in now to “stake your claim” in your areas of expertise isn’t a bad idea.

When starting to use Quora as a reputation-builder, make sure to fill out your profile information thoroughly, including the sections on the site where you can include your “bio” for various topics. Even if you aren’t ready to spend time answering questions, you want to make sure your expertise is showcased concisely, otherwise people will arrive at your Quora profile page and have no idea who you are or what you do. Keep the length down and make sure the first handful of words convey something meaningful because this is what others will see when you answer questions in a given topic area.

To get more out of Quora, follow the topics that you believe you can contribute meaningfully to. Respond to questions when you have a specific point of view or expertise that hasn’t yet been demonstrated. Follow the people with whom you are truly interested in getting on their radar, learning from, or interacting with.

Quora has a section in your profile where you can post content. This can be a good place to re-purpose some of your relevant content and tagging it with specific topic keywords to add your two cents without specifically answering a question. You can also answer a question and link to your content elsewhere, although do this sparingly as this can appear gratuitous if you simply use Quora to point people to your blog or site. Don’t think of Quora as a “gateway” to your other presences, like your blog, but instead think of it as an opportunity to provide a snapshot of who you are and what you do on a site where people are paying attention.

Because of Quora’s breadth of topics, you can choose almost any area and set of topics to show what you know. However, the most active areas are the tech, new and social media, and mobile spaces.

Focus

If your expertise is useful to small business owners, you may want to head over to Focus. This site has been around a few years now and while Quora came out of beta with a bang, Focus has been building a rich database of information and experts a little under the radar and now boasts over a million active users. While Quora tackles a broad range of topics, Focus looks to help business owners make better decisions, so expect to find more business topics and technology topics related to business.

On Focus, Q&A is only one of the site’s features. Think of it as an expert network or “expert market” where business owners can not only get answers to their questions but download published research and attend live teleconference events.

As you fill out your Focus profile, you can opt to check a box to apply to become an official “expert” on the site, but there is no guarantee you’ll be chosen. Focus takes a careful look at several criteria to assess if you are actually an expert in your field and if you have a proclivity for sharing your knowledge with others in a longer format such as on a blog versus Twitter. They also look at your interactions and the retweets your content generates to see if what you write resonates with your community of followers.

If interested in having you as an official expert on their site, Focus will conduct a phone interview. Some experts providing long form research are compensated but not those solely participating in the community Q&A. Otherwise, you can contribute to the Q&A section in basically the same way you might on Quora. The site is constantly undergoing incremental changes to improve how it works, so expect to see better integration of features over time.

Namesake

Namesake calls itself a “community for real conversation.” Namesake takes a more “live” approach to conversations on topics, with announcements of conversations happening on the site, and the people participating and watching.. The conversations are then archived and can be added to over time.

There is a little more chaos on Namesake compared to Quora or Focus.com; every response isn’t carefully composed and the best aren’t always “endorsed” or voted up to the top. These are “conversations” after all. Namesake groups people, conversations and experts by topic, so like Quora and Focus, you should follow the topics that are most interesting and relevant to you, to find experts and to identify conversations where you can be an expert.

The site claims experts in broad topic areas, from technology to entertainment to politics. You can claim your areas of expertise (up to 10) when you are filling out your bio, but you gain expert credibility and status through endorsements from others for your conversation contributions. A nice feature on your Namesake bio is the ability to add video to showcase who you are and what you know.

Whereas Quora might feel like a place for tech insiders, and Focus is more business-oriented and straightforward, Namesake has a scrappier feel where tech hipsters are jumping into a sandbox to play and experiment.

Tips for Q&A Site Success

As you can see, all of these sites have Q&A as a feature, but Quora emphasizes this aspect the most. Regardless of which site you choose as your platform for showcasing your expertise, know that the process can be time-consuming (and possibly addicting). Here are a few tips for making the most of your efforts:

1. Pick one site. Be great. While you might dabble in all three sites to get a feel for them and to make sure they offer you the best audience for your information, to get more out of a Q&A site, you really need to pick one where you’ll spend most of your time and energy. Be thoughtful, and take care to get a feel for the community and learn the etiquette of the site. Be helpful.
2. Incorporate the site into your content production. If you’re already blogging and tweeting, participating actively in a Q&A site can feel like a burden. Look for ways to incorporate a little time each day on the Q&A site of your choice so you can be present, pay attention and add value. Over the long haul, you’ll find it easier and easier to make the time to contribute, but don’t get carried away and let it dominate your time unless it is proving to be a fruitful outlet.
3. Add to your content sharing. When you blog, find an appropriate way to share that in your profile or in an answer or as a post or update on a Q&A site. Make sure not to use the Q&A site as nothing more than a gateway or traffic driver to your blog or site, but do think of it as an additional place to archive examples of your work.
4. Go narrow, not broad. You can’t be all things to all people. You can’t be a true “expert” in many, many things. Part of building your reputation is knowing who you are, what you can offer others, and then focusing on providing consistent, valuable information. Sure, you can provide the occasional answer to a random topic (for example, I’ve responded to questions about RVing and parenting on Quora) because this shows you’re human and multidimensional. But when building your reputation and your brand, consistency is key.

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Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Kyle Thill. My day-to-day responsibilities revolve around managing the service, parts and warranty departments for Toyota Lift of Minnesota (TLM), one of 68 Toyota forklift dealerships here in the United States. I also have the privilege of managing a small sales staff of three.

What’s a typical day like for you?

Of late we’ve been looking at other ways to market ourselves, due in large part to budget constraints. I’ve been tasked with involving TLM more deeply in the social networking world. Getting myself or the company on Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter (or, as many of our salesmen call it, “Tweeter”). While there hasn’t been a lot of activity in our area yet, we can’t help but think that this whole social networking thing will eventually get to our industry, and we just want to be ready when it does.

What gear and software do you use, and why?

From the early days of CompuServe dialup, when we actually launched our first web site, to today’s cable connection, we primarily use the tools available to the average Joe. While we like working on the web, we certainly wouldn’t be called cutting edge when it comes to the application of technology. Early on it was just CompuServe and its browser, and we haven’t gone much further than IE7 yet. Sure, we monitor Twitter  for key words throughout the day with Seesmic Desktop, and incorporate Google Alerts and Google Reader for the same reasons, but there hasn’t been the need to use any really fancy technology yet. We blog daily using Blogger, again simply using the tools that are available economically to everyone.

What’s your favorite web working tip?

My job is less about the web and more about my other earthly responsibilities. The web, however, is a medium that can be reviewed quickly and relatively efficiently if you choose the right tools. For example, monitoring Twitter and Facebook can be done quickly and with relatively few distractions using Seesmic Desktop.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

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Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Adam Valuckas, and I have an awesome full-time job creating online video advertising for a newspaper. My second full-time job is my startup VJIX Creative. At VJIX I make online videos that highlight how applications will befit their customers. I have two projects completed and a few more on the way.

What’s a typical day like for you?
When working on VJIX projects, my days are spent animating motion graphics. It can be painstaking work — I imagine that watching me work is about as exciting as watching my girlfriend knit. To keep myself entertained I stream films from Netflix on my Xbox nonstop unless I’m editing audio.

What gear and software do you use, and why?
My main offline apps are:

• Adobe After Effects. I am an Apple guy but nothing compares to After Effects for motion graphics. For longer projects I create individual shots in After Effects then edit them in Final Cut Pro.
• Final Cut Pro. If you’re an editor then you’re either a Final Cut Pro or an Avid person. I got into editing when nonlinear editing (computer editing, not tape-to-tape) was just coming into stride with the Sony ES7 (if you know what this is, you’re old!) and Media 100, Final Cut was the logical choice for me.
• Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I use these for general photo and vector manipulation.
• Firefox. The Firefox extensions PermaTabs and FaviconizeTab are the perfect duo to create small permanent tabs for web sites that you use frequently.

I also use a ton of other Mac applications to get my work done. Something a professional might not think about using is iTunes, but it is a fantastic production music library program. You can lump music into genres, convert it to AIFF for editing, and then easily “locate in finder” to keep your production music easy to listen to and quick to find.

My main online apps are:

• Google Apps. Google Apps provides great email, document editing and calendaring. I just wish Google would treat Apps users as first-rate Google citizens.  The video encoding is awesomely horrible — also I would like to have access to services that my personal Gmail account does.
• PipelineDeals CRM. Pipeline’s CRM lands somewhere between Highrise and Salesforce in complexity, but its customization and flexible sales flow are by far the best for me. I have custom fields, to-do lists, and reports that fulfill my lust for information organization. Plus, it is really easy to use. I use it for project management as well, even though it wasn’t intended to do that.
• Evernote. With Evernote I can keep insane amounts of Internet snippets in one location. I use tags with Flickr, but with Evernote I use a ton of folders, which means I can make quick web clippings with the Firefox extension without having to think about filing. No more losing things!
• Netvibes. What makes this service really useful is its widgets. On one of my Netvibes tabs I have (my ego surfing tab) is my Alexa rating, Feedburner subscribers, Google page rank, various keyword alerts, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
• JungleDisk: Every hard drive will die; it is a sad fact of life. I chose JungleDisk online backup and storage for its additional services, such as the local disk, and being able to keep files backed up that are no longer on my computer.

What’s your favorite web working tip?
If you’re going to make a web video you should aim to produce it to HD standards (unless you’re talking about video banners). With HD video you can upload it to video-sharing sites like YouTube (maintaining HD quality playback), repurpose that footage for TV, and size the video down to play on your web site (a win-win-win situation!)

Always remember that compression is your video’s nemesis. When uploading your video to a video-sharing site or converting it to the Flash format, you want to limit the amount of compression before encoding it for the web. In the video editing world, Quicktime is the best format to use. An uncompressed two-minute video may be 4-8GB. But a Quicktime video using the Photo Jpeg codec will give you around a 600MB file that retains virtually all the quality. These files are huge, but you want to start with the best quality video before converting it for the web.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

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• Izzy Video — How to shoot and edit video. It covers a wide range of topics like cinematography, lighting, recording good audio, gear, editing and distribution.
• Paperclipping.com — This show is hosted by Hyman’s wife, Noell, and it’s all about scrapbooking and design principles.
• Rolling R’s — This show is hosted by Hyman’s friend, Larry Keim, and teaches people the Spanish language.

All three are membership sites where some of the content is available for free, but the majority of the material is available to paid members only. I caught up with Hyman to ask him a few questions about the work he does, and how he does it. Below is an edited transcript of our interview:

Simon: How did you originally get into video? And what made you decide to start blogging about it?

Hyman: I’m one of those people who started with video as a passion. I got my first video camera when my first son was born nearly 12 years ago. A few years later, I got my first Mac and found iMovie, so I started doing some basic editing. Then I upgraded to Final Cut Express, upgraded my camera, and started getting other gear like microphones and lights. Eventually I moved to a Mac Pro, Final Cut Pro, and now the camera I use is the Sony PWM-EX1.

When I got into video, I did a lot of reading on the subject. I was shocked there weren’t a lot of great places to learn video on the web, so I started making videos that showed the principles I was learning. That was how Izzy Video got started. It filled a need.

Simon: What’s a typical day like for you?

Hyman: The days vary, but on days when we’re shooting video (once per week), it goes like this:

1. Clear out the furniture in my living room.
2. Set up my studio gear like lights, C-stands, microphone and background.
3. Shoot video for a couple hours, depending on the subject and what shows we’re shooting.
4. Transfer the footage into the computer.
5. Edit the video, and while it’s rendering I take down the studio and move my furniture back into place.

Between shooting, editing and posting the videos, that keeps me busy for the day. On other days of the week I keep my load pretty light. I work from a coffee shop probably three times per week, answering emails, researching, outlining, writing, tweeting and doing other social media stuff.

I’m also working on creating a resource that shows other people how to create profitable video podcasts like we’ve done. We’ve done it three times, using a business model based on what Don McAllister did with ScreencastsOnline.

One of the reasons I became a full-time video podcaster was so I could spend more time with my family: I do things like take my kids to and from school, help them with homework, and run them to dentist appointments. Also, I exercise every day, and right now I’m participating in NanoWriMo, so I’m writing a novel in November. I frequently joke with Noell that I feel as if I’m retired. When I’m working, I do the stuff I love to do. And my work leaves plenty of time with my family.

Simon: Your blog is based around the message that video is not a “black art,” and is accessible for nearly anyone. The barriers to entry for aspiring video shooters/producers are getting lower. What gear would you recommend to someone just starting out; I’m curious as to whether you’d recommend a video-capable DSLR over a dedicated video camera?

Hyman: The biggest mistake I think people make when they’re buying gear for video is they spend too much time and money on the video camera, and not enough on audio and lighting. What kind of gear should a new person get? That depends on what they’ll be shooting, but for someone who just wants to post video on the web, something like this might work:

1. A basic three-point lighting setup such as three Rifa lights from Lowel. Lighting is critical for a good image, and many people don’t spend any time or money on it.
2. A wireless lavalier (lapel) microphone setup like the Sennheiser Evolution G2 series.
3. Any video camera that shoots HD, has an external mic input, and records to a solid state media like an SD card (I capture to SxS cards). I don’t recommend someone buy a tape-based or hard drive camera. Tape is going away, and hard drives have too many problems.

A video-capable DSLR can be an excellent choice if you’ll always be shooting short video clips and you don’t mind spending more on important accessories that make the camera usable as a video camera. I just bought my first video-capable DSLR a few weeks ago. I love the imagery I get from it, with the shallow depth of field, color saturation and overall film-look. Still, for professional gigs, it’s probably a good idea to stick with dedicated video cameras. That might change over the next couple years, though.

Simon: I suppose it varies with the project, but what gear do you like to use?

Hyman: Some favorite pieces of gear I use:

• My camera is the Sony PMW-EX1, and I adore this thing. It shoots amazing HD footage, and it shoots true slow motion. It’s incredible.
• My favorite microphone is the Sennheiser ME66 shotgun mic.
• For lights I use several Chimera lights inside of Chimera soft boxes.
• I also love my Scrim Jim set of diffusion panels and scrims. I use this for controlling light outdoors.

I could go on and on, because I do tend to be a gear hound. I enjoy the tools probably a little too much. Here’s a list of most of the gear I use. By the way, I’ve created video tutorials on how to use all this gear. They’re on my web site.

Simon: With modern computers and software, video editing and production can be added to the list of careers that are “web worker compatible.” What’s your office setup like, and if you work on the road, what makes it possible?

Hyman: My office is in my bedroom. I work at a table with a Mac Pro (8 cores). I edit in Final Cut Studio, which means Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, Compressor, and other tools. I have a closet full of gear, and as I mentioned earlier, I periodically convert my living room into a studio.

If I’m just doing Internet work then I use my MacBook Pro and a Verizon card, and I’ll usually head to Starbucks for that. Sometimes I’ll do mobile video editing, but not often. That’s a good thing, because I have an old 17″ Macbook Pro, and it’s a little slow for video these days.

Simon: Finally, video is being used in a lot of places on the web now (on web sites, in advertising, as part of multimedia projects). What is an interesting use of commercial video you’ve seen recently?

Hyman: One of the most interesting things I’ve seen lately with video is the Apple ad running on major web sites like the NY Times. Along the top of the page there’s a video banner, and in the sidebar there’s another video ad that interacts with the video ad at the top of the page. That’s brilliant.

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