This looks like it is a tool that will catch on and have some very good uses for businesses.
This post from Ben Ayers gives some very good tips:
1. For a snapshot of recent notifications, hover your cursor over the home link at the top of the page (if you see a red notification count). You’ll see a few sentences of highlights (as shown in the above screenshot).
2. Questions can be voted up or down. Voting a question up makes it appear in your stream against your profile.
3. Voting a question up also shares that question with your followers.
4. To cancel out your vote up, click the up arrow again. Do not click down to cancel the up, this will in fact collapse the question meaning it will not appear in your stream.
5. You can be public or anonymous on a thread. The option to do this is in the top right of the screen when you are looking at a question. If you choose to be anonymous, all of your interaction with that question will be marked as ‘anonymous user’ instead of linking to your profile. Anonymity does not follow through to other questions though – it’s a question-by-question option.
6. You can link to topics or people simply by typing in speech marks in your question or answer, like this link to Public Relations. As you type, the options appear for your link.
7. Follow people and topics that are of interest to you as this will make your Quora browsing experience infinitely more personalized and useful.
8. For privacy, you can ask Quora to not allow search engines to index your profile – i.e. your name. This is simple to control, under settings at the top of the page. Also simple to find in the same section is the ‘deactivate your account link’ should you want to do that.
9. Quora is very democratic – answers to questions only appear in reverse-chronological order by default. As soon as they start getting votes from readers, they move up or down based on popularity. So always try to say something useful as opposed to braggy, and it will do the site and your usefulness on it wonders.
10. Fill out your profile in as complete a way as you can, because it is very search engine friendly. After under one month on Quora personally, my profile already appears in Google’s front page of search results for my name.
