I’m thrilled to announce that:

• I will continue working with Answers.com, helping to drive content strategy. I’ve been with Answers.com since the beginning and I’m really looking forward to helping the team take it to the next level. We can, and will, build the most trusted and comprehensive collection of answers on the web.
• I will also be working with other companies, helping them create great content, and connecting that content to the people who need it.
• I will be spending more time writing and speaking.

I’m also very excited that one of my first clients will be Chris Whitten, who has built a great genealogy site, WikiTree. Chris is the brilliant mind that created WikiAnswers and I’m excited to be working with him again.

I love writing and speaking, and I’ve received enough positive feedback that I’m going to be spending more time on those activities. I also love working with people to create great sites. I’m very happy that Answers is allowing me to continue playing a leadership role there while also pursuing other dreams. The final and greatest perk is that I’ll be working closely with my wonderful wife.

This is an exciting new stage for me. And if there’s something great we can do together, please let me know.

It was a very emotional day at Answers.com, as roughly 2/3 of the Jerusalem employees were let go. I was impressed by how people handled themselves. It was a day filled not with anger but with dark humor, nostalgia, friendship and support.

TechCrunch covered this with Answers.com Gets Gutted By Its New Owner: Massive Layoffs, CEO And CTO Out and then Business Insider made it more colorful with Ready, Aim, Fire Everybody.

The narrative is Big Evil Capitalists Gone Wild, which is always a fun story. But not always the truth. Here’s another version. [Note: this is all my unofficial interpretation]

Answers.com has gone through a remarkable 12-year roller coaster ride frequently reinventing itself. What began as a free alt-click Windows reference tool became an enterprise product, then a subscription-based consumer tool, and then an advertiser supported reference website. Now it’s a community-based Q&A site.

The new owners are exclusively focusing on quality content and community. They’re throwing out the old. That includes old projects like 1-Click Answers and Reference Answers. It also includes people. Senior management was mostly spared in past Answers.com layoffs. Not this time.

They’re shifting the focus from technology company to content & community company. The company was founded by technological geniuses who always had a bias towards great technology. Engineering is now a support function. It’s a means, not an ends.

They’re shifting the balance of power from Jerusalem (where the company was founded and where engineering sits) to New York (where the community team is headquartered) and St. Louis (where the acquiring company resides). This is painful to me. That doesn’t make it wrong.

TechCrunch closed their article with “Answers Corporation’s brand new owner effectively gutted the company, raising doubts about its long-term viability.” I strongly disagree. Answers.com took an unsentimental look at all the good and the bad from the company’s first twelve years, and ruthlessly cut everything it felt distracted from its core mission of a great community creating great content.

I wish great things to all former Answers.com employees. You’re all great people and I wish you great happiness and success. And I wish the same for Answers.com and its current employees. When you recover from the shock and the survivor’s guilt I hope you remember that this is not Answers.com’s first pivot. You still have a great (albeit smaller) team, and you should still have a very bright future.

We’ve already been on the buying end of acquisitions ranging from the wildly successful (WikiAnswers) to the unsuccessful (Brainboost) to the aborted (Dictionary.com). Being on the receiving end has exposed me to a very different series of enlightening experiences.

We’re currently in Survivor Phase. The acquisition has been completed but the new organizational chart has yet to be set. To be clear, most people’s efforts today are focused on work, particularly in determining our goals and setting out to accomplish them. And yet in many cases the work takes place within a larger subtext of self-promotion, jockeying for position, and the occasional backstabbing.

Individuals (formerly known as teammates) perform tasks that they’d ordinarily leave for others. They box out competitors (formerly known as colleagues). They give ever so helpful feedback to key decision makers. They write snarky blog posts (I’ve heard).

There are some benefits the company gets from this audition period, including:

• The acquiring company gets a glimpse of how people perform under pressure.
• Work gets done faster than usual.
• There’s a focus and intensity that often leads to greater output.

However there are also downsides, potentially including:

• The glimpse as to how individuals perform while auditioning may be a very poor indicator as to how people perform day-to-day.
• The work that was done more quickly often needs to be redone correctly.
• Significant and often irreparable damage may be done to the relationships people have with each other and with the company.
• The people you most need leave; the people you least need appear to shine.

Acquiring Company Key Steps

For the acquiring company, here are some key steps to take:

1. Decide what your main goal for the transition is

Most specifically, which of these is your primary goal:

1. Build the best team to move the acquired company forward
2. Learn all you can about what the team does so you can take it over

In either case you want to learn all you can about the team, the technology, the processes, etc. But if you’re primarily focused on Goal #2 you’re unlikely to succeed particularly well on Goal #1. So start by deciding what your primary goal is.

The following steps assume that you’ve chosen Goal #1 as your primary goal.

2. Learn about your people

Obviously watching your people perform is an important step in evaluating them, but be careful about the following potential sources of error:

• As Heisenberg noted, in some cases you change a system significantly when you observe it.
• You may naturally end up evaluating not what people contribute to the team, but how well they communicate with you. So for example native English speakers may rise to the top.
• Beware of misplaced confidence gap. In Future Babble (an excellent book) Dan Gardner discusses how we’re naturally drawn toward highly confident people and away from people who better understand nuance and uncertainty, even though the latter group generally makes better decisions. Be careful.

If you want to build a successful team you’re going to need to talk to the team members and get their opinions of each other. Yes, you need to filter for bias. People are jockeying for position. Even those that have already booked passage off the island are biased by how much they like and respect their teammates. But talk to enough people, with the proper level of skepticism and caution, and you should get a good idea of which people most help the company. Make sure you’re talking to the rank & file and not just to managers. The nature of organizations is that subordinates understand their managers far better than managers understand their subordinates. For each person, pay most attention to the opinions of people who work closely with him or her.

3. Build your team

This part is a two-way street. As you hone in on who you want, make sure it’s mutual. You may want to keep your cards close to your vest and announce them to everybody all at once, but that’s likely a recipe for failure. Don’t forget that:

• You need to earn trust, build confidence, and create something great with your new team. You have to trust them for them to trust you.
• Now is the time to see if you can work with these people. If you can’t include them in the decisions regarding the team, they’ll assume (probably correctly) that you won’t really include them in other decisions.
• The last thing you want to do is to count on somebody who has little desire to be part of the team you put together.

4. Don’t take too long

This period can be traumatic and dangerous. The worst part is that some of your team members will feel they’re playing a zero-sum game against each other. You want your team members’ interests and desires to be aligned, so they’re focused on working together to build something great. You’d like to minimize the days spent trying to throw each other off the island.

Acquired Company’s Employees

If you’re in an employee of a company that just got acquired, here’s some advice:

• Sitting back and saying “I don’t play politics, if they don’t know how good I am then I don’t want them” is rarely the right approach. If there’s an upheaval potentially coming, figure out what role will best help you serve the company, find happiness and fulfillment, and advance your career. If you like your current role and are confident that it won’t change, you can ignore this. Otherwise, determine how you best want to serve the company and communicate that.
• Have a thick skin. These transition periods are temporary, and the new reality that settles in may or may not be great for you. Don’t throw yourself off the island because the transition period is rocky, or because you’d rather jump then be thrown.
• Be sensitive to the damage you may be causing others. You’re playing with other people’s lives, careers, reputations, and financial and emotional well being. Do the right thing. We may argue about what the right thing is, but make sure you’re thinking about it and making a decision, not just harming others through carelessness or selfishness.
• Remember that in addition to any ethical issues, hurting others often has a price. Decide whether or not you want to pay it.

Conclusion

The period between when an acquisition is finalized and the new organization chart is set can be both critical and traumatic. If you’re on the acquiring side, make sure building the ideal team is your primary focus, and that you’re moving forward quickly and intelligently to get the right team in place. Make sure you’re talking to the rank & file and not just to management to understand who really contributes what.

If you’re an employee whose company was acquired, consider how the landscape may be changing and where you may best fit in. Make your case. Be aware of how you’re affecting others. And take a deep breath and stand tall. This may be an opportunity to find the role where you can best serve the company and find happiness and fulfillment.

To sum it up, an acquisition is generally only as valuable as the team that will be moving it forward. Whether you just bought a company or are a member of a company that was just bought, do what you can to use this opportunity to get a great team in place.

Postscript: I’ve received feedback that I’ve exaggerated the amount of politics and positioning going on, whereas in fact most people are really just focused on doing their jobs and working productively with their teammates. I accept that. It’s the exceptions that stand out. Given how much tension in the air, the amount of teamwork and goodwill is actually quite impressive.

Big day for Answers.com.

“Answers.com, (NASDAQ: ANSW), creators of the leading answer engine Answers.com®, today announced that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement to be acquired by AFCV Holdings, LLC, a portfolio company of growth equity investor Summit Partners, for a total cash consideration of approximately $127 million.”

Here’s the full press release. Stock price for the sale is $10.50, and it’s still going to take some time to work through all the legal details including a shareholder vote.

“After an exciting six years as a public company, we are very pleased to achieve considerable value for our investors.”

Wow, six years. When we went public we were just changing from a subscription-based Alt-Click dictionary / encyclopedia pop-up to a free website. Now our growth is primarily from a phenomenal community that works hard at creating great answers that sit alongside our licensed reference sources.

I am proud to have been part of this since we started (as Guru.net) back in January 1999. It’s been one hell of a ride. Time to take it to the next level.

I’m excited that I’m going to hear Liz Cohen discuss corporate blogging at Word Camp Jerusalem this Sunday. Liz runs Answers.com’s blog, no.stupid.answers.

Liz Cohen

A corporate blog lets you connect people with your vision of your company. Through no.stupid.answers Liz and her colleagues connect with the Answers.com community around a vision of building the world’s greatest collection of questions and answers.

The blog includes posts about:

• Community members, such as Kharrima is Still A-w-e-s-o-m-e!, Crystal McCann’s recent profile of Kharrima
• New Content, such as Pnina Baumgarten’s Time to learn Hinglish. And Rhyming Slang. And… about our new sources for Neologisms, Nutrition, biographies of contemporary musicians (from Abbato ZZ Top), Hinglish, and Rhyming Slang.
• Feature of the week, such as Video answers and new mobile community features
• Poetry Cafe, where Matthew Crowder coordinates poetry from our community, such as WorldWide520′s touching Why we wiki

The most important benefit from all this is to gather the community around a shared vision, working together to provide great answers. no.stupid.answers provides a face and a voice to the Answers.com mission.

Other corporate blogs that I love:

• Outspoken Media. I just really enjoy Lisa Barone’s writing. The primary purpose of her blog seems to be to get people to want to hire Outspoken Media when they’re looking to increase recognition of their brand. This is the normal model for a consulting agency writing a blog. If I were looking for branding help, they’d probably be the first company I’d turn to, solely because their blog connected me to their company and convinced me of their excellence. My favorite post from that blog: The 7 blog posts you shouldn’t publish.
• The search marketing industry has some excellent blogs including SEOmoz and SEO Book. In each case they’re always on-topic with great info, and they upsell to pro memberships for their tools. SEO Book has an excellent post today, How to Write Good. My favorite SEOmoz post was Jennifer Lopez’s SEO & The Princess Bride. But warning: the Princess Bride post got an unusually high number of down votes on SEOmoz. Part of many corporate blogs’ success is always staying on target and providing actionable information to their users. You may sometimes have trade-offs, in this case an entertaining but non-actionable post that helps some readers connect with you and your brand, but pisses others off.
• Rena Reich and Omer’s Scratching Post. My wife’s blogs connecting people to The Pet Wiki. The former is filled with actionable posts about setting up a Wiki. The latter is told from a cat’s perspective. Both help connect people with The Pet Wiki’s story, pet lovers sharing useful information. The former has the added advantage that if Rena ever starts accepting clients for MediaWiki consulting, the blog would help with that story as well. My favorites from each blog: Facebook Connect for MediaWiki and chilling with my babe.

Note that my blog is terrible as a corporate blog. It’s posts are never off-topic only because there is no established topic. It’s all the thoughts that I need to articulate and that I hope others find helpful. I hope it connects you to my story, and to Answers.com’s. My story? I’m fortunate to be helping great people do a great job.

What are your favorite corporate blogs? Why do you blog (or not blog)? I’d love to connect to your story too.

Our AnswersDotCom Twitter account has started inviting questions! Ask a question to @answersdotcom and it will check to see if we already have your answer. If we don’t, members of the community will often try to help.

I’ve been playing with it, and it’s actually quite fun, asking, answering, and just watching. Here was my favorite so far:

Try it, it’s fun (and sometimes even helpful):

• To Ask: Tweet to @answersdotcom. For example: @answersdotcom What is the battery life for the iPad?
• To Answer: Go to http://twitter.com/answersdotcom and see where it Tweeted that it doesn’t have an answer. Click on the link to submit the question to WikiAnswers. Often you’ll see a list of questions that includes a different wording of the same question, and you can just click that question wording to merge. Or try to answer the question on WikiAnswers. If there’s a good answer on the page, Tweet it back to the person who asked.
• To Just Watch: Yeah, this is fun for voyeurs. Open a tab in your Twitter client (or in your browser) searching @AnswersDotCom. And keep http://twitter.com/answersdotcom open. Enjoy the fun. For example, I just learned that:
  • Violin strings were made of sheep’s intestines called “catgut” http://bit.ly/aAHQ2k
  • Elephants trunks don’t have any bones, just strong muscles http://bit.ly/bFFB5S
  • We’re born with 300-350 bones, but by the time we’re adults we’re down to 206. http://bit.ly/9RoH0C

And this is being demo’ed at the 140 conference in New York today, so there should be lots of good questions & answers.

Let me know any cool Q&A you came across (or questions you have about the service) by commenting on this post, or Tweeting to @GilR.

Have fun!

Some Kings Live Forever

Recent reports of quality content’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The importance of quality content is going to increase, not decrease. If Answers.com (where I work) and Demand Media succeed, it will be because we succeeded in following Wikipedia’s model and creating high quality content that matches what users are looking for. What content does well in search engines? Content that generates incoming links, and that addresses the questions that users want answered.

The importance of becoming an authority site was my top conclusion from PubCon. Google values sites that other trusted sites link to. Google’s moves into personalized and social search are going to increase the social cues Google uses in determining what content users value.

The quality eulogies were kicked off by Michael Arrington, whose The End of Hand Crafted Content provocatively claimed that “Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content.”

Great linkbait, made all the greater by how far off it is. Here are some points:

High Quality = High User Value

The best of the recent articles is Martin Bryant’s Audiences aren’t stupid, Quality’s not dead, which ends with this point:

“There’s an uncomfortable truth that ‘quality’ content producers need to bear in mind too. Sometimes content farms with their hyper-targeted approach provide exactly what an audience needs. Even if it’s cheap and rushed, an article telling you “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew” (for example) answers a specific question – one that people most quality outlets wouldn’t bother to answer in isolation.

Sometimes it’s the ‘low-quality’ content that fulfills an audience’s need. In that case, is it really low quality?”

Bryant’s point also answers the Forbes editor who warned students about Demand Media:

“They’re paying seasoned journalists five cents a word for their stories. They’re paying very skilled video photographers $2 per video. You’re not going to learn anything about a secret drone attack in Afghanistan on this site. You’re going to find stories like: What’s the best way to donate a coat in Saratoga Springs?

Forbes is a business & financial magazine. Are most of their stories about “a secret drone attack in Afghanistan?” And if readers are more interested in “What’s the best way to donate a coat in Saratoga Springs?” then which story provides more value to the user? It seems like Demand Media is doing exactly what Forbes is trying to do, provide quality content of interest to a commercial audience. But Demand Media may be doing it better.

At PubCon Google’s Matt Cutts encouraged web publishers to do keyword research to see what users are looking for, so that the publishers  can meet the demand. This is a good thing.

Quality: The Wikipedia Model

User generated content sites’ long term success is dependent on becoming a trusted authority. Back in 2004 I was asked to add Wikipedia’s content into Answers.com (then GuruNet). I resisted because Wikipedia was lower quality than the professionally published sources we were licensing. Studies now show Wikipedia quality to be on par with Britannica. When Chris Whitten approached us to purchase WikiAnswers I had a similar hesitation, because it was often lower quality than our licensed content. But like Wikipedia (though a few years behind), WikiAnswers quality improves every year. I’ll put a stake in the ground and say that within 12 months it will be considered the authority site for answers.

Quality Unique Voices Will Find Audiences

Ross Dawson and Doc Searls have also provided clarity in this debate.

Searls writes:

“I’ve been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my “content” for about twenty years now, and I haven’t been destroyed by a damn thing. I kinda don’t think Fast Food Content is going to shut down serious writers (no matter where and how they write) any more than McDonald’s killed the market for serious chefs.”

Searls later writes “what matters most is what each of us does better than anybody or anything else.”

Dawson expects “the rise of effective content reputation systems, that allow you to assess the likely quality of articles before you read them or even find them.” One way or another, I’m sure Google will figure something out here.

Quality and LinkBait

The Arrington post was classic linkbait, content that’s hand-crafted to maximize reaction and incoming links. While writing that post Arrington couldn’t possibly have believed the article’s premise, that hand crafted content is dead. The piece was a masterstroke of hand crafted content. BTW, it currently ranks 3rd (of 21 million) in Google for “hand crafted,” showing what good hand crafted content can do for you.

Linkbait has similar problems as TV news shows that interview extremists from both sides because that makes better television than interviewing moderates as they explain nuanced views.

A second theme ran through Arrington’s piece, that writers need to figure out a new disruptive way to win. Arrington wrote that daring innovators will thrive, and that we need to learn to deal with the changing models. But a thorough and intelligent exposition of that idea wouldn’t have generated much passion in the blogosphere. So Arrington went with the linkbait theme of “The End of Hand Crafted Content.”

If one were really worried about ways that people try to game the system to get poor quality content to rank, he’d focus more on this kind of Linkbait and less on Demand Media.

Conclusion: Quality Remains King

Quality content is more critical than ever to a content web site’s long term success, and the sites that want to be here for the long run are going to be paying more and more attention to it. They’ll become high quality, or die trying.

Google's definition link

There’s been a lot of coverage the last few days about Google changing its definition link to point to its own site. Since 2005 it had pointed to Answers.com, and before that to Dictionary.com.

A few key points:

• Answers.com announced this upcoming change in our November 4 conference call and in SEC filings. Google was kind enough to provide a heads up, and we passed the message along.
• We very much appreciate that Google valued our site enough to direct its definition seeking users to us for nearly five years. Google has every right to create its own definition service, and to decide for itself how best to serve its users. In this case Google is choosing its own fast, clean dictionary pages over Answers.com’s more robust pages that often include encyclopedias and specialized dictionaries (compare for example the pages defining annuity on Answers.com and on Google).
• When Google first decided to point their definition link to Answers.com, we were just making the transition from being a pop-up dictionary / encyclopedia focused on short data sources to a more robust product that today includes many longer entries from publishers like Oxford and Gale and over 6 million answered questions from our community. We actually have Google GUI guru Marissa Mayer to thank for suggesting that we move from a tabbed interface (where each source was on its own tab) to displaying our sources one after the other, which helped our site develop into a more complete information resource.
• The Google definition link accounted for only about 5% of Answers.com traffic in recent months. The bulk of Answers.com traffic today is to our community Q&A.
• In 2005 Google’s definition link really helped us take off. However it really has been the least significant component of our relationship with Google. Google continues to direct many of their searchers to the answers we provide. And the bulk of our revenue comes from Google AdSense, a contract we actually recently renewed to continue through January 2012.

In summary, Web users increasingly choose Google to find information. We thank Google for pointing their definition link to us for almost 5 years. We’re sorry to see that traffic go, but it was only 5% of our traffic. Google has built tremendous networks that connect information seekers, information providers, and advertisers. We’re glad to be a part of these networks. We will continue focusing our efforts on providing quality answers from licensed sources and from the community, and we hope users will continue finding us both directly and from Google search.