Aardvark Question

Up until just a few weeks ago, I had no idea what Aardvark was.  But then the ever helpful John Battelle introduced me to Aardvark co-founder Max Ventilla.  Since that introduction, I have become a huge fan of Aardvark.

So what exactly is Aardvark?  Well for starters, here are a few the one-liners the company says they have used to explain it:

  • Aardvark is Social Search:  finding information from real people.
  • Aardvark is a live channel to anyone in your network who has the knowledge and experience to answer your question.
  • Aardvark is the IM buddy who always knows the right person to ask.
  • Aardvark is a community of helpful people who share tips and opinions.

For me, Aardvark has become the perfect way to get answers to questions where I need an opinion / recommendation instead of just facts.  For instance, we are thinking about going to Key West for our honeymoon so I asked Aardvark what the best hotel was.  I got a great answer back from a guy named “Gregory K” who was a friend of a friend that I was connected with on the site.

This appears to be the type of information that must people are using Aardvark for.  As Max Ventilla explained on the company blog:

Aardvark  is great for subjective questions and queries for more complex information.  When you’re looking for a hotel in Chicago, or an HDTV recommendation, or a suggestion for a new mystery novel, the information you need is dependent on *taste* and *context*.  The kind of hotel you’d like depends on why you’re travelling, who will be staying there, your style and price range, and all sorts of other considerations that you can easily talk about when you’re in a conversation with another person.

Given that, it is no wonder that “Question Topics” like Travel Tips and Bars / Restaurants were asked most often on Aardvark during the month of April:

Question Topics asked on Aardvark

For marketers of all sorts, Aardvark has the potential to become an incredibly important tool.  After all, the holy grail of marketing is being able to reach a person at the very moment when they are most interested in your brand.  That is why Google has a market cap of $125 billion and why the world has been abuzz about customer service through Twitter.

So what does this mean for Aardvark and its implications for marketing?  Let’s go back to the simple question that I asked about Key West.  Just from that interaction, marketers could learn / do the following:

  • A hotel in Key West could have placed an ad in the answer I received from Aardvark where they offered me a special Honeymoon vacation package.
  • Since Aardvark knows I live in Cincinnati, the system knows I probably want to fly to Key West… an opportunity for Delta to market a special offer to me.
  • I told Aardvark that Gregory’s answer was helpful to me.  So Aardvark now knows that Gregory is good at travel recommendations.  If they found a handful of other “Gregs”, then they could tout these influencers to the travel industry.

And the list goes on and on since the possibilities are limitless.  After all, Aardvark puts recommendations at the fingertips of consumers.  And those recommendations are invaluable to marketers everywhere.

So if you have yet to try Aardvark, I have a few invites left that I would be happy to pass along.  Just shoot me an email at dave.knox@gmail.com.  The time is now for the smart marketers to start playing around with the service before the secret is out.

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