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How can people ask questions outside of conferences?

How can people ask questions outside of conferences? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Here’s a great question from Ed. Ed asks, “Matt please consider a live Q&A for disabled people who can’t get to conferences and, therefore, can’t ask you a ‘hallway’ questions. Thank you.” It’s a really good point, conferences are great way to meet face-to-face and just get to talk to people. And I–I think if you are disabled, many times you can still make it to a conference. But we think very hard about “How can we communicate in a scaleable way to help as many people as possible. So last year, 2008, really we ran a lot of experiments were we tried doing live webchats and we would get hundreds of Webmasters showing up to ask questions. That was a lot of fun but there were some limits. Oftentimes, it would have to be at a particular time and you couldn’t have someone in Europe and someone in Japan show up at the same time. And so you’d have to have them at different times. And it kind of taxes you a little bit to try to tune in and listen on WebEx or a–or a Webmaster at live chat for two or three hours as people just answer questions non-stop, so what we’ve been doing this year is taking those same questions and answering them in little bite-sized chunks in video. In that way, you know, every other day or so you might get a video that you can watch for a couple of minutes and you’re not watching four hours of video all at once which would probably get just a little bit old. We’re definitely open to other ways to get good questions, so we have to EDU groups and folks like a bunch of different Googlers show up there and a bunch of different super users who are people who are sort of like guides who don’t officially work for Google but know a lot of really great questions to ask to help people out. There are some really fantastic people to help out on those forums. So we’re open to different ways to improve communication. Maybe we’ll do another Webmaster chat down the road. For the time being it seems like the videos are a little bit more useful because you can kind of get a little bite-sized chunk of something interesting but you don’t have to listen for an hour or two or three to try to get your question answered.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: