Welcome to online social 2.0 — this time, with feeling

Why we are trying to create a social platform that is a little more true to life…

We are an inherently social species. Most of us are wired to seek out the company of likeminded individuals, to share our experiences and to act on the recommendations from the people we trust. We are capable of maintaining social relationships with a wide number of groups and individuals simultaneously, and there’s a joy to the complexity of social relationships.

We think nothing of showing one side of ourselves to our colleagues, perhaps, and another to our childhood friends. We discuss music and politics with some people, go on holiday with others and only share confidences with those closest to us. That’s just how we behave. It comes naturally to us because it’s how our brains have evolved over millennia.

But our offline and online social lives are often very different.

Online, degrees of intimacy are artificially flattened so everyone is a “friend” and your contact list can become an unwieldy mix of friends, colleagues and relatives (and becomes more complex still when your mother starts following you).

If you’re anything like me, what should be easy and instinctive — the act of sharing — can become complicated because you’re worried about reaching the right (or wrong people), so you start tweaking the seemingly infinite configuration settings. Or you end up using multiple apps to communicate with the same people in different ways…

We set up Vero (www.vero.co) because we wanted to create a digital equivalent of offline social relationships — something simple, intuitive and ultimately more rewarding because it reflects how we form and manage relationships in real life. By categorizing your contacts as ‘Close Friends’, ‘Friends’ and ‘Acquaintances’, you can easily and intuitively control your privacy settings to ensure you’re reaching the desired audience for each post (without your contacts knowing which ‘loop’ they are in).

Offering the user choice is at the heart of what we’re trying to achieve with Vero. Users can decide to make themselves “followable”, and in turn, follow the brands, organizations and artists they are interested in.

Another key decision for us was to be an ad free platform. We don’t believe that anyone should be forced to see an ad they didn’t ask for, sitting uneasily in their feed like an uninvited guest, amongst posts from the friends and brands they are actively interested in. We won’t ever insert a brand ad in your feed; Vero users only see communications from brands they have chosen to follow.

We are not hostile to the interests of brands — far from it — we are trying to facilitate more honest engagement between brands and consumers by enabling people to discover things from the brands they find interesting, not those that an algorithm decides they might be interested in based on tens of thousands of data points.

This isn’t just a win for consumers — I’m delighted to say that many brands from a variety of different sectors are approaching Vero as an opportunity to engage with their consumers and fans in a different, more authentic way.

We are also offering brands something that no other social platform offers — the ability to sell directly from their posts. ROI is notoriously difficult to track on existing social platforms and it’s hard to correlate “Likes” to sales. With Vero, brands will soon be able to insert “buy now” buttons directly into their posts, enabling their followers to purchase items without leaving their feed via Apple Pay.

Vero isn’t a shopping app or an instant messenger app, or a music recommendation app or somewhere you go to share your experiences with those people who are important to you — it’s all of those things.

We are just getting started. If you’d like to try Vero, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Ayman Hariri is the co-founder of Vero (www.vero.co)