Nestoria Interview – Alan Jones Part II

Yesterday I published the first half of my interview with Alan Jones, Chief Hindsight Officer of Doing Words.  Once I got started with the questioning I was unstoppable, so I've broken the interview up into two parts, the first focused mainly on search, and the second on social media, the value of a site or app. having personality, and his dream web tool. 

Alan, you've also had experience managing the social media or community sections of sites. Do you think there are any products that shouldn't be represented in this space, or do you think everything is worthy of 'friending' or having 'fans'?
There's so many! I don't want to know what medication you're taking, for instance! And unless you're a close friend, in fact, even if you are a close friend, I don't give a damn about your taste in music, most of the time. The relationship between consumer and music has changed dramatically with the rise of iTunes. The size of the available music inventory is just nuts now — if you tried to put a copy of every single available for sale on iTunes on a shelf, that shelf would go right around the Earth, out to Pluto, do a few laps of the sun and back, and still there'd be a few boxes yet to find a space. And yet, all of that music has fans, every single track in existence, as you'll find if you are, or know someone, who is an artist on MySpace, where you can have tens of thousands of fans and still not have a record deal. That's not helping me find new music I'll like, not like Pandora, Last.fm, and my favourite, Australia's own Wearehunted.com (stoopid giant record labels prevent me from using Pandora in Australia!) Friends and fans don't work for super-large datasets. They work for smaller sets that answer questions like, "I have $50 and three hours, what can I do this Friday night in my neighbourhood that I might like?"

How important do you think the 'voice' of a company is as far as talking to its community goes?
If you're on the web, it's all voice, all the time. Humans, evolving as we have done to read body language, facial gestures, tone and action to help us interpret meaning, tend to play very close attention to everything about a website that might help them understand what makes you tick, what makes you different from your competitors, why you should be trusted with personal data, credit card details and their precious time, which can only ever be invested once. It's the lack of the physical presence of 'the company' in the room before us that makes us pay way too much attention to every other clue that might tell us what's going on with a website.
As a result, even if you're trying not to have a brand voice online, you've got a brand voice online, just your voice is saying, "we're trying to be bland and unremarkable, please ignore us." It doesn't matter whether you have a community of customers who can 'see' each other, as on a social network, or whether they are more or less invisible to each other, as on a real estate vertical, they are still a community and you are in a conversation with them. Your brand name, your brand design, your tagline, your homepage, your learn more page, your blog page, your about us page, your FAQ page and your contact us page obviously all scream out your company voice the loudest, but don't forget to reflect that voice in everything else, including but not limited to your customer service emails, email newsletters, privacy policy, terms and conditions and wherever possible, contract documents for relationships with employees, service providers, business partners and investors.
You can't not have a voice, so you may as well have a distinctive and consistent one. Your competitors can copy your design and your technology, they can poach your best people and lure away your most strategic partners, but they can't take away your voice. They can imitate it, but we all know what great flattery that can be, and consumers can always tell the original apart from the imitator.

Along the same lines do you think everything deserves a web app.? There are hundreds out there, do you have some examples of any really great and unexpected apps. you've come across?
Frankly, most new web app categories catch me by surprise — I'm not a very imaginative person. I might have dreamed but never would have believed that some day it might be possible for so many people to be interacting in a rich and complex graphical environment like World of Warcraft in near real-time, and that so much of the depth and potential of that interaction would depend on the web being there as the transport layer for the locations, graphic primitives, message traffic, voice and commerce. I certainly never realised until I got my iPhone that the most important feature in a digital camera might be the third-party apps you could install for it.
Familiar with the "any technology, sufficiently advanced, will appear to be magic" quote? My favourite example is Soundhound on the iPhone. You can play it just about any song on any speaker, even hum the song out of tune, and it's scarily accurate at identifying the song. I have a very basic grasp of some of the underlying principles powering that, but my poor old head simply can't extrapolate from that to identifying the world's entire popular music collection over a 3G connection and then bringing back a link to buy the track, share it with a friend, watch the YouTube video, etc. Wow.

I've been looking at a lot of map based mashup apps. are there any of this sort you can recommend to me?
Three (though really they're the same app, skinned for different target audiences) Runmeter, Cyclemeter and Walkmeter by Abvio.com. Not only do they track your route, let you store it, share it and compare it with previous times you've done the same route; not only do they read out your progress in terms of distance, speed and time... they can tweet your progress to your Twitter friends and then read any replies to you while you run, ride or walk. I leave my iPhone running it when I'm training for Oxfam Trailwalker (click though if you can spare a small donation) and I love how it pipes up to tell me not just how far I've gone and how quickly, but what my Twitter friends think about it.
I'm also in the early stages of thinking through a web app that would allow people to log the position and other info about roadside memorials. I'd then like to do a photo book and interview the people who've created and maintained the memorials about the deceased, what the motivation was to build memorial, what they'd like to say to other drivers, and then upload that content to the website too.
...fancy helping me build it?
That's a really nice idea.  Not sure I can help but one of the team probably could.

Now for Ed's suggested line of questioning: How important do you think it is to give your web app a personality? And what are the basics things to consider when you're deciding on the 'voice' of your business.
Essential! As per above — your only choice is to have a boring personality or an engaging personality online — you can't not have a personality. The only thing to consider is whether your voice is original and sincere: does it reflect who the founders really are? If one of the founders left, could the voice be sustained by those still there? How broadly and deeply can you express your voice online?

And lastly, if technology was no obstacle what would your dream app. do?
Do my accounts and my taxes. Seriously, we are making no meaningful progress here. There are web apps that allow me to log the data, but when it comes to actually doing the accounts and paying the taxes, I do all the work (or I pay a book keeper and an accountant to do all the work). I want/need an app that looks at my company accounts and calls out the stuff that's good and bad, and explains to me what I need to do about it. I need personal accounting software that goes out with my permission and snuffles up all my transaction records, categorises it, completes my tax filing, then comes back to me and says, "OK, next year, this is what you should do differently, starting from day 1 instead of day 364..."
Some might say I'm a dreamer...

That is a genius idea!  I think we'd all be into that!  Thanks again for taking the time to be so thorough.

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