The first time I saw the “Live Community” module on my TurboTax screens I was a little annoyed. It caused the page to load slower, and I just didn’t see the value. Oh, and also I’m really cynical. But by the time I’d finished doing my taxes I’d used the module 5 times and I was completely sold.
I’m not a big user of Yahoo! Answers, although I have played around with it a little. When I first moved to San Francisco, I posed the question, “What is that loud horn out in the San Francisco marina that’s been going on for two hours?.” It was great - I got the answer back in three minutes and I could finally get some sleep (it was a foghorn). Since then though, I’ve only used it sporadically. I’m not even remotely motivated by getting points or elevating my reputation in the community, I’m pretty good at searching the web if I need a piece of information, and I’m not really into just browsing through questions and answers. So why am I such a big fan of the community Q&A on TurboTax? I think the key is its amazing relevance - to both the person seeking knowledge and the knowledge providers. The module existed on each step of my tax process, and it became clear that the questions being asked were directly related the particular step that I was on. For example, at the point in my taxes when I was being told to “Fill in the fair market value of your rental property on the date it was ready and available to rent,” the Live Community module was showcasing questions such as, “Is the assessed value the same as the fair market value of my property?”
There’s a big difference between visiting a catch-all site for community knowledge, and having that community knowledge accessible at just the right time and the right place. The implementation of Answers on TurboTax is the longest of the long tails – these questions are so highly specific that I’d never think to go to Yahoo Answers to ask them, but having a module like this here was extremely helpful. These were questions being asked and answered by people who had gone through just what I was going through. I think there is incredible value to be gained when a site can identify and connect groups of people all looking for the same thing at the same time - especially at such a granular level.
Another great side-effect of this level of granularity was the fact that there was no searching involved. In every case where I got stuck and looked to the community for help, I was able to quickly find exactly what I was looking for. There weren’t 20 or 30 questions I had to wade through, there were usually 3 or 4. And there weren’t hundreds of answers, there were usually 1 or 2 and they were usually very helpful. It might be because this is the first year for Live Community on TurboTax and they don’t have a lot of questions and answers yet – but it might also be that because the task is so specific, once two or three answers are submitted, the right one is usually there and easy to find, so there isn’t as much need for a system of checks and balances.
Of course, I can’t discount the type of content that’s being dealt with here, which gave the application a sense of purity. Although it does seem like they’re trying to form some kind of community, with a “Leaderboard” and “My Q&A” profiles, I doubt there’s any real need for it. This module isn’t about forming a community and connecting to people who are passionate about taxes – most people just want to get the whole process over with. So there wasn’t a need for me to socialize with the users who were asking or answering these questions, it was simply about the knowledge.