Ask About The Mouse Blog

Expose Yourself!

2009-11-22T08:36:00.000-08:00

No, this has nothing to do with a trench coat, but everything to do with promoting your own Disney website, blog, podcast, or Disney related business on Ask About The Mouse.

There's a ton of info about Walt Disney World on the web - all calling out for attention. The big question is - how do you get your content noticed?

Ask About The Mouse is designed to be very search engine friendly. Don't believe it? Lets take a topic that everyone can relate to and has been widely covered - "Where can I get the best hamburger at Walt Disney World". Maybe a typical search query would be "best wdw hamburger". Let's see how this search fares on Google.

At the time of this writing, the Ask About The Mouse question was at the top of the search results! That's pretty good, considering it's based mostly on the question itself and less on the quality of the answers. Users are finding the Ask About The Mouse questions when they're searching for answers.

Now your Disney site (or one you're a fan of) may have already discussed the perfect answer to this question. That's great! The problem is, it seems search engines are having problems finding that content on your site. If your content is a podcast, the problem is even harder as speech isn't typically indexed by search engines without some major effort.

What you're invited (and encouraged) to do is, leverage the search friendly strength of Ask About The Mouse to connect the answers on your website, blog, podcast, or business with the Disney questions people need answers to.

What this means is:

If there's an Ask About The Mouse question you've already answered, provide a brief summary of your answer, then link to your site for more details. You've done a lot of hard work. Point people to your great response!
Maybe there's an interesting topic you've discussed, but you can't find an appropriate question to link to it. That's OK, create your own question then answer it yourself. That's totally legit. Help people find the value you've created!

In these instances, Ask About The Mouse is acting sort of like a "Disney Yellow Pages" - pointing users to your site based on the types of content you specialize in. One other benefit is that these "incoming links" should help your own site's search engine page rank. Yep, you're double dipping in the goodness!

If you're a Disney business, here's an added benefit. By registering on Ask About The Mouse, and focusing on answering the questions your business specializes in, you'll further establish yourself as an expert in that area. The tag section of your profile reflects your areas of expertise. Most importantly, users will be able to find you, your business, and instantly understand where you can deliver them value.

So go ahead.... expose yourself!

Providing Good Answers

2009-10-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

Asking Disney questions is what drives Ask About The Mouse, but it's the great responses provided by the community that really provide the value. Here are some tips to provide the best answers possible.

Give One Answer
Offer a single response to the question. A complete, but concise answer should be your goal in helping to answer a question. People needing help will be able to quickly identify their options by browsing the responses. When others agree with your response, they'll be able to easily vote up your answer (and reward you with some rep!!). Voting on multi-part answers is hard - especially if someone can agree with one part of the response, but not another. When you do have more than one answer to a question, simply submit each response as a separate answer. If both answers are voted up, you'll gain rep twice as fast!

Anticipate follow-up
One way to give a complete answer, is to put yourself in the asker's shoes. Remember what it was like planning your first few trips to a Disney park and all the questions you didn't know enough to ask. Try to anticipate what follow-up questions someone might ask. For instance, when answering a question on a great location to view the fireworks, offering a great location is fine, but also give some advice on the best time to get there. For instance, "The upper level of train station fills up quick, be sure to get there at least 45 minutes before the fireworks start".

Share Your Experiences
Personalize your response. Offer any details about your particular experiences that you think might help someone else. A quick story is a great way for people to connect with your answer and help drive your point home.

Link to Resources
When you can, link to other resources which can provide more detail and information. There's no shame in promoting your blog, business, or referring someone you've had a good experience with. Additional resources can only help to strengthen the information you're providing and will allow people to "dig deeper" if they'd like to.

It All Starts With a Question

2009-10-19T16:04:00.000-07:00

Ask About the Mouse is all about helping people get great answers to their Disney questions - and asking almost anything about the Disney parks worldwide is fair game. Here are some easy tips to help in getting your questions answered.

Ask One Question (at a time)
Planning a trip to any Disney destination is complex. There are a lot of things to consider and you're bound to have a ton of questions. That's natural. On Ask About The Mouse, you are allowed to post as many questions as you like. For free (you don't even need to register)! Don't feel you need to smush all your questions into a single question post.

There are a few advantages to asking each of your questions separately. Smaller, focused questions are easier to answer. Asking each question separately will allowing you to get direct and succinct responses - quickly. Another benefit is that your targeted question will attract more people with the experiences you're asking about. These people will be able to provide better and more detailed answers (which is the goal of asking the question in the first place).

Add Some Tags
Adding tags to your question will help in getting your question noticed. Remember, tags are a simple and effective way to categorize your question. These tags help the local Ask About The Mouse experts easily find your question. Again, the ultimate goal is to get the best answers possible -and tagging your question is a way to attract the people qualified to give those answers.

no question is to small (after all)
Never feel that a question is to small or trivial to ask. Chances are if you have the question, then someone else does too. Not only will you get the answer you need, but the answer will already be there for the next person who needs it. Everyone has to start somewhere - and the place to start is asking the question.

What is a Tag?

2009-10-12T10:09:00.000-07:00

Ask About The Mouse uses tags as an easy and informal way to group questions by topic. Because the concept of tagging may not be familiar, let's talk about why tags are useful and investigate some easy ways to use tags.

Why do we need tags?
Grouping similar things together is natural for people. It helps us get organized and find the things we need quickly and easily. In grade school, I'm sure many of us used binders to keep all of our science notes together and organized - but separate from the notes we needed for math class. This metaphor was extended to computers, where we organize files (like digital photos or emails) into folders for easy retrieval later.

Here's a simple example where this type of organizational method gets complicated. Let's say you wanted to ask a question about "dining in Epcot for someone with food allergies". In a traditional message board you might have to choose between several forum topic areas to ask this question. For example, there may be separate topic areas of the forum for "dining", "Epcot", and "special needs" discussions. Choosing the right place to ask your question from these options might not be obvious. One alternative would be to post the question in all three places and then manually combine the responses you get (although some sites frown on cross posting).

There are better ways to deal with this problem. One simple solution is to introduce the concept of tags.

What is a tag?
A tag is simply a category name to describe the question at a high level. Like a folder, the "tag category" will allow you to group similar questions together. Unlike folders, it's simple and intuitive to give an item multiple tags - allowing an question to fit into several topic areas at the same time. No need to post your question in multiple areas of the forum. No need to manually combine all the responses. All the information is stored in one easy to find location.

Defining a tag
When a question is asked, the asker specifies which "tag categories" the question covers. As the category tag name is entered, the system will suggest similar tags that already exist. If no suitable option is found, feel free to create an entirely new tag. Like questions however, please only define tags that you think will be helpful to at least one other person in finding your question.

Also, don't stress over picking the perfect set of tags. Remember, some aspects of the site are like a wiki and can be edited by the community . If a similar tag to one you've created already exists, someone in the community can retag (or extend) the tags you've provided to place the question into it's proper place.

Cool, what else should I know?
Once questions are tagged there are a bunch of useful things people can do

Registered users can select a set of "interesting tags". Doing so will highlight questions with tags that match their interests.
Tags can be combined to locate a very particular subset of questions. This could be useful in finding only the questions pertaining to "dining", "walt-disney-world", and "special needs" for instance.
Many questions will be of little interest to some users. These users can select a set of "ignored tags" to sort of move these questions into the background.

I hope this simple introduction helps new users get started with tags.

A different kind of Disney site

2009-10-07T06:49:00.000-07:00

Ask About the Mouse is a different kind of Disney Q&A site devoted to sharing Disney knowledge. It's kind of like Wikipedia meets The Disney Mom's Panel with a way for everyone to contribute.

Let's take a look at some basic components of the Ask About the Mouse experience.

It all starts with a Disney Parks related question
The main goal is to help people get good answers to their Disney questions quickly. Trip planning questions or asking about park history are both great places to start. Simply ask your question. There's no need to log in or register (but there are benefits to doing so - more on that later).

Here come the answers
Once the question is asked, users can start submitting answers - immediately. Again, there is no need to register before answering a question.

So - now I need to sift through a million responses?
No. Not exactly - and here's where registering for the site begins to pay dividends. Once you register on Ask About the Mouse, you begin to earn reputation for the questions you ask and the answers you contribute. With your reputation, you can vote up the best answers, edit existing responses to make them more complete, and earn fun badges based on your participation. The best answers (determined by user vote) will bubble to the top - ideally you'll only ever need to look at the top few responses to find some good answers to your question.

What if I don't like the top voted response?
That's perfectly OK. As the question asker you can select any answer as the best response to your question. You are under no obligation to select a highly voted response. The answer you select will appear at the top of all submitted responses. You can also answer your own question if you like.

Will I need to remember another user name and password?
No. Ask About The Mouse uses something called OpenID. OpenID allows you to use an existing login that you may already have on Google, Yahoo, Flickr or a number of other popular web sites. You sign in to those sites and they confirm that you are who you say you are. No passwords are stored on Ask About The Mouse.

So, it's another message board?
No. There are already a number of great Disney discussion boards out there and this site is not meant to replace or compete with those communities. Ask About the Mouse is devoted to asking and answering focused Disney Parks questions. In fact, feel free to link to discussion on other sites in your response. Creating a web of information is a good thing for everyone. Very good.

Why not just ask the The Disney Mom's Panel my question?
You should, you'll get a great response. The thing is, there are only a handful of Disney Moms and it might take some time for them to get to your question. This is simply an alternative method to get a bunch of answers, quickly.

There's a lot more to talk about so stay tuned for more information how to best use Ask About the Mouse and it's features.

In the meantime ask some great questions and help others by providing some awesome answers.