Todd Wilkinson is the co-founder of Respectance, started in July 2006. They have a realistic, non-sensational approach to the question of immortality and an interview worth reading, indeed. If you love reading as much as I do, you can also read their blog here.

Can you please tell us a bit about what is Respectance and what human needs does Respectance hope to fulfill?

Respectance is the place for people to come together to share their memories. Every life is special and everyone has their story to tell. With Respectance, family and friends join together to celebrate those lives and share those stories with photos, stories, music, and videos.

Respectance is the convergence of personal and social media. Consider Grandma’s 80th birthday party for example, lots of photos are taken, though you’ll never see most of them. But if someone later creates a Respectance Tribute to Grandma, everyone can upload their favorite photos, essentially creating a pool of content richer than any one person’s collection. You can then select the photos that really mean something to you, choose some touching background music, even select transition styles, or add personal captions to the images. Then, you can instantly create a video of your personal memories that speaks precisely to you, that you can share with others, or download and keep forever.

Memorial sites are about the dead. Respectance is about the living. People feel better when we remember how our lives were touched by someone we loved. When we share these memories with others, we enhance the positive effects for everyone involved. Rather than passive observers, Respectance allows everyone, young and old, near and far to participate, interact, and contribute in their own way.

How do you foresee the market developing to respond to those needs?

I think it’s natural that social media should mature towards specialized segments and niches. The Virginia Tech tragedy proved to us that people have a real need to connect and contribute something at emotional times, and the web is becoming an accepted facilitator for this.

But it’s still about positioning. Facebook and the others have specific target markets and propositions and they’re not necessarily the place for the family to share memories about a loved one. The market needs to provide dedicated venues that really fit particular moments, feelings, and participants. As much as I love YouTube, I certainly wouldn’t want my grandmother’s Tribute right next to the video of the kid doing skateboard tricks. So we expect to see services that both understand and respond to their users’ very particular needs in very targeted ways.

With the growing baby-boomer populations, and communities such as DailyStrength that address issues relating to sickness or age, how do you foresee Respectance helping with these issues?

Support is a central aspect of community. That’s why Respectance has blogging features on users’ personal profile pages allowing people to tell their own stories in their own ways. We’ve also got a groups area, allowing people to create, join, and contribute to groups around specific topics. There’s no doubt that reaching out, communicating, and being together with others who are interested, who’ve gone through what you’re going through, and who understand what you’re experiencing can help out enormously.

Respectance helps in its own way as the place to go that is dedicated exclusively to sharing memories. Whether for family, friends, or even high-profile personalities, Respectance is the place where people know they can say their piece, contribute how they want, and find others who will appreciate their participation.

It sometimes seems like VC’s are less inclined to provide financial backing to startups that are emotionally driven as opposed to revenue-driven. What do you think is a way we can make emotionally-driven startups such as Respectance generate enough revenue to intrigue VC’s so that more of these type of non-revenue based startups can succeed?

A commercial imperative is not incompatible with emotion-driven startups. The fact is, consumers are human and humans are emotionally driven. The market is filled with products, services, and brands that appeal directly to human emotion. The trick is finding the right balance between your commercial positioning and your emotional credibility.

We’ve coined the term “emosocial media” to reflect our approach. We believe that emotion in media is most powerful when there is relevance and connection. Go to Flickr and search for “car”. There are more than a million results but, chances are, none have any particular significance to you. Now go back to the example of Grandma. All of those photos in the Respectance Tribute are relevant because they mean something to the people around Grandma. They, in effect, connect people together the same way Grandma herself does.

I think the trick is finding that clear target group and connecting with them for a very specific reason, at a very specific moment, and with a very specific value proposition. And doing it in a way that responds to that group’s feelings and needs. Emotion for emotion’s sake is not enough. Startups need to show their stakeholders that they’ve identified a viable market niche not served (or not served well) by existing providers. They need to come up with clever ways to monetize and grow the proposition. Then they need to build the business model around this opportunity in a way that treats users with the respect they demand and deserve. At that point, the sales argument to the VC’s is just as compelling as with any other kind of promising business, if not more so!

Where do you see social media heading with regards to startups like Respectance in the next 3 – 5 years?

It’s definitely going to become more commercial and accepted as such. Smart business is always looking for opportunities and will surely find them here but individuals and small startups will be driving innovation. And it’s going to have wide impact, affecting advertising, employment search, media channels, etc, but also politics, education, gaming, social movements, and religion, you name it.

It still seems novel now but social media is really liberating us from traditional ways of consuming media and for many, it’s already a normal part of life. I grew up watching TV: waiting for certain days and specific times for particular shows and then sat back and passively consumed what I was fed without any input or direction on my part. Nothing in the entire experience was about me.

I don’t watch TV anymore. Now I determine what I’m going to consume, when I’m going to consume it, how I’m going to participate, what I’m going to share, and whom I’m going to do it with. Now it’s all about me. I’m in control. I’m the owner. And that’s the way it should be. Participatory media is personal media. I think creative startups that grasp this concept will have a lot of potential to work with and I’m really excited to follow the developments.