So Jelly has arrived. Thanks for that Biz Stone!
I've been reading a little around Jelly (only a week old) and it being a Q & A platform I thought I'd better ask what others thought of it. Below are some of their thoughts, and below that are my slightly more formalised ones.
As with every new social platform that rears it's (not so ugly in the case of Jelly) head above the parapet of development, I ask myself how could brands use this.
Jelly's proposition is simple "Let's help each other". Jelly set's out to find the answers a search engine just cannot and is going up against the likes of Quora and Yahoo Answers. Some commentary from around the web has included "surely I can just use all my other social platforms to ask my peers questions", but while it's possible none of them solely set out to do that. Jelly has ... and while your network will have a certain amount of expertise, I have been pleasantly surprised by some of the answers by my networks network and this has created new opportunities to connect. For me the best way to explain Jelly is "Insta-question-time", the visual nature of the app allows you to give more context to your questions and responses have been surprisingly immediate.
Before I start discussing the potential opportunities for Jelly I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on my experience with the app. So far I love it, apart from the minor glitches (but that could just be my install), possibly two of my best answers have come from @aedewards01 when asking "what everyone thought of Jelly" at the time the only thing I could think of taking a photo of was my keyboard, I was promptly told it needed a clean. The next question I asked "What would you write under this" followed by a picture of a title which read "The self importance of channels" my favourite answer from @dunk_rice (not in my immediate network) was ".... is only topped by the arrogance of topics" ... made me chuckle. My only real negative with Jelly was the initial understanding of how the questions are delivered to me and by whom, as soon as I started to see people outside of my networks it got a little confusing and felt a little unstructured, but I'm over that now.
Brands on Jelly
Some brands have already started using Jelly this include Nandos, Ben and Jerrys, Carphone Warehouse and Asda to name a few, all very experimental and nothing particularly ground breaking quite yet (as you'd expect). My feeling is at the moment, there are a bunch of social media early adopters using Jelly so this is the perfect time to start experimenting without getting too caught out as a brand, that said normal social media etiquette and guidelines apply people.
Jelly for Business
How Jelly could be used by brands and individuals in business:
- The design community can use it to test design elements and get opinion much in the same way Dribbble works
- Product Managers and Product Development teams can use it to give individuals sneak peeks of features and get opinion
- Marketers can use it in their story-telling efforts by using reflective questions and pose questions about industry trends relevant to their audience
- And yes then there is the crowdsourcing ideas for the business although my initial thoughts is this would be quite tough to manage due to the unstructured nature of the platform
- Fairly obvious and formulaic ideas, the questions I've answered so far have been engaging and often funny, it does not matter what channel you're in think first about what's going to engage your audience. Preaching over.
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