Once upon a time, I briefly moonlighted as a ChaCha Guide.
Not for the money, mind you – ChaCha
pays a mere $0.10 to $0.20 per question answered. At the time I was an avid
ChaCha user, and simply wanted to gain insight into the types of questions
others were asking.
For those of you who don’t know, ChaCha is a free mobile
answers service that allows people to ask questions in conversational English
and receive answers via text message within 5 minutes. Users ask a question
either by phone (1-800-2CHACHA) or text message (242242), which is then routed
to a Guide with “expertise” on that subject. The Guide uses search engines and
other resources to find the answer to the question, and then the answer is
returned to the user in the form of a text. Prior to buying my iPhone I found
it quite useful for getting answers to a host of questions.
As a ChaCha Guide, I saw a wide variety of questions come
in. (The most recent questions are now published on their homepage, so you can check
them out for yourself.) The majority seemed to be general factoids, often linked to current events – e.g. “Who won
the Laker’s game last night?” Many were also utilitarian in nature, such as “Which bus do I take to get to North
Beach from downtown?” or “What do you use to clean flat screen televisions?”
Another type of question seemed to be geared towards settling bets with friends – if you’re debating when the first episode of The
Fresh Prince of Bel Air aired,
you can determine the winner without having to go home and Google it.
However, the queries I found most interesting were the ones
that were conversational in nature.
It seemed like many of the queries weren’t just about getting the answer to a
question – they were also aimed at generating a human connection, something
that Google, Bing or any other traditional search engine cannot provide. It may
sound odd, but for many users there’s something almost comforting about the
knowledge that they can send a text at any time and a human being somewhere
will respond within minutes.
What could be next for ChaCha?
- ChaCha has a lot of data on its users. ChaCha collects the
string of questions from its users, and pieces the information together to
draw conclusions about each mobile number’s owner. ChaCha even has a “genderizer” function that can determine the gender based on the kinds of questions that are
asked. Combining algorithmic functions like this and user-inputted values
(they can submit their zip code, for example, to receive answers targeted
to their location) ChaCha can make solid evaluations of a person’s age,
gender, location, interests, and other attributes.
- If done right, ChaCha’s advertising program could be a goldmine.
Following from the first point, ChaCha’s user data gives them the
potential for serving extremely targeted ads. The key to successful text
advertising is that they need to be relevant, conversational and
non-obtrusive – and preferably promotional. The thing I like about ChaCha’s
advertising platform is that the initial ad only takes up a small amount of
characters, and if the user wants to see more info on the ad they can text
a code back – it’s entirely in their control. ChaCha can also target by
keywords, which seems like the best fit for much of its advertising. If a
user asked which restaurant they should go to for dinner, ChaCha could
serve them an ad for a local sushi spot with a coupon code. It is
important to note that approximately 80% of ChaCha’s users are under the
age of 25, so this certainly won’t be a fit for every advertiser, but it
could work well for some.
- ChaCha has potential for real-time search. Everyone and their mother has been talking about
Twitter and its application to real-time search. With the right tools
ChaCha could potentially have a similar function. The main difference is
that Twitter is based on broadcast, while ChaCha is based on queries.
However, ChaCha still has a measure of what matters to people at a given
moment. It knows that 793 people have asked how old Lebron James is and
226 people asked when the next Lakers game is. Sound a little similar to
Twitter trends? Furthermore, ChaCha knows the basic attributes of a lot of
these people, so instead of just saying what matters to people it could go
as far as what matters to what type of
people. Clearly the demographic is limited (also much like Twitter), but
there could be some serious potential there.
Only time will tell the future success or failure of ChaCha.
Its primary criticism is that many of the answers are not accurate, due to the
human nature of the responses. And smartphones and their apps, particularly
ones like Google Voice
Search for the iPhone, could make ChaCha obsolete eventually. But it certainly
has a solid user base, and a premise with potential for expansion. I’ll definitely be keeping tabs on this company.
