A new social network or online community comes along and every brand has to answer one basic question: Should we be active in this channel? No matter whether you’re among the world’s biggest brands, or a small home-based business, that’s a question you have to wrestle with.
Lowe’s, the home improvement retailer, appears to have wrestled with that question and answered “yes” when it comes to Jelly, the new social search/Q&A app that just launched last week.
Jelly invites users to post questions with a photo attached. From what I’ve seen during the first week, a lot of questions have been less-than-serious and mostly about users kicking the tires and learning how Jelly works. But Lowe’s spotted (or perhaps was alerted to?) a serious question that asked how to mount art on a brick wall, and delivered a helpful reply. Jelly highlighted this in first-week recap yesterday.
As far as I know, Lowe’s is the first brand — or at least major brand — to be active on Jelly. They were also an early adopter on Vine, Twitter’s six-second video platform.
There’s no way that I can tell to find out if Lowe’s has answered or asked anything else on Jelly. That linked username above their reply sends you back to their Twitter account; Jelly doesn’t offer profile pages at the moment that collect all of a user’s activity.
After a brand wrestles with the Should we be active here? question, the next questions are things like, Are we getting any benefit? and How long should we stay active? We’ll have to see how Lowe’s answers those.
By the way, if you know of other brands that have used Jelly, drop us a note in the comments.
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