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Misalignments of these two forces damage brands, so companies will seek band-aids. $400 is nothing if Godin has the #3 spot on Google for your brand and you have some disgruntled customers.
I just wish companies would spend the time to work the problem from the front end. Great content, strong customer support, solid SEO and authentic participation in social networks is a damn good start.
As a consumer, if I rant about a product or service, I'd be really offended if the producer or service provider apologized to a separate audience at a separate venue. That would be like me telling my friend that someone had insulted me, then the insulter (after hearing from my friend) going on TV to apologize for his insult -- without ever directly contacting me.
Granted, it's not an either-or position. You can apologize personally and apologize publicly. But the whole value here hinges on Godin's ability to make his hub pages the go-to spot for brand conversation tracking. To effectively become the Wikipedia of brand conversations. That's quite a steep hill to climb.
While those of us in the social media space know who Godin is and understand the concept, we often forget how tiny the percentage of social media consumers/interactors is compared to the overall consumer marketplace.
My mother will never go to Godin's hub pages. She'll never understand the point.
What I suspect is really happening here is Godin is going to sell these hub pages as conveniences to brands. Don't bother tracking and dealing with all the disparate conversations on the Web, just fork over a few Benjamins and pay one PR guy (maybe an intern) to post spin copy to your hub page every time you find a criticism. Why log into all those blogs and Facebook pages and forums when you can just post here. It will lead to less direct conversation, not more. Granted, I'm more cynical than most.
That said, I hope Godin does build these hub pages, because I'd love a tracking repository of brand conversations, if only to develop a punch list of places I need to be talking directly. And that list probably won't include the hub page itself.
... from an SEO perspective, it's likely that Godin's setup will appear at least in the top 5 for many brands if he's able to obtain authority. So what we have will be Google results #1 Brand, #2 Brand, #3 BrandsinPublic.
So while my Mom may never specifically seek out Godin's setup, that #3 listing on Google will likely get her attention.
In other words, we want to level the playing field for the brands - through discussion (but ultimately through government intervention such as laws etc.). In a way this is unbecoming of capitalism.
This is sort of akin to the financial industry running rampant and then asking the government to bail them out (ofcourse that stuff is way deeper than I know, but I'm seeing a similar field).
If Seth is NOT allowed to do this, then that may be a disincentive for him to achieve his current status. If Seth is setting a price of 400$, and there is benefit to the companies to pay, why is that wrong?
Of course the reason we are saying it may be wrong is that it may be 'directly and noticeably detrimental'. What about other actions that may not be detrimental?
I guess with power comes responsibility ;)
As a consumer, I don't think I would use this. If I want to know if I should buy a Mini or not I would search the fan forums, read a review, etc. There's no way I would wade through what I've seen so far.
That said, Seth is a smart, smart man. He stands to make a lot of money from this concept. I don't think it's blackmail. If companies do spend the $400/month, hopefully it will pay for better presentation of the info (i.e. you could pay pennies for Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to categorize each comment) and therefore provide better value to visitors. Brands in Public is an excellent innovation for social media.
On one side, the site seems like a great idea. These Squidoo pages could be an invaluable resource for people looking to work with one of these companies or buy their products/services. I can see myself looking up companies here to save time Googling and searching social media sites for information. And it takes time and money to put something like this together. Advertising is a lousy business model, so this seems like an effective way to monetize the website in a way that everyone benefits.
From what I read, the brands would be able to feature posts, add introductory information and contact information, etc. by paying the $400/month fee. They still can't "control" the conversation. It's not much different from some of the larger review websites like Shopzilla.
That said, there should probably be a free way for brands to participate in the conversation too, just to be fair. (Of course they could always participate on the social networks) I'm sure there will be a lot of people who think there's nothing wrong, and some people who think what Godin and Squidoo are doing isn't right... I guess I'm somewhere in the middle.
That's funny, sort of. This reminds me of a story where a popular blogger (or so I faintly recall) created a site and would write positively and/or negatively about various public companies (or so I faintly recall). These were powerful companies and apparently the blogger had the ability to affect their stockprices. He monetized this by buying or selling shares prior to writing reviews.
Aggregating conversations is fine. This shouldn't be illegal because this is a value-add to brands, the ability to really 'influence' conversations from a central hub where these will be aggregated as opposed to influencing them throughout the social sphere. As Jay said, this is beneficial to companies so they don't have to track disparate conversations.
Imagine for a second that you weren't tracking conversations, but tracking a company's actions (such as how green they are or their decisions affecting the environment or their openness about manufacturing conditions etc.) and aggregated those. These aren't conversations but perhaps aggregation of media (assuming no comments are present). Would then it seem like blackmail to charge a company?
Take aggregated conversations and add in some kind of sentiment tool:
Godin is essentially offering cheap access to analytics, regardless of participation or not.
If we take into account Godin's power and then limit his entrepreneurial ability based on that, then we should redefine human rights and other systems as well (that's a whole 'nother conversation).
The key thing I see is that Godin is able to isolate company members. How would a company be allowed access? Would they be monitored? Would access be granted based on tiered pricing (different pricing for diff # of company representatives?) but even in that situation a company would just want to pay for one and have all the thoughts/conversations being administered through one employee. Most likely these employees would also have color coded conversations (the way you can tell techcrunch employees responding in a long thread of commentary by color).
I could see a free-to-converse model working better (similar to free-to-play) where you can talk for free but you may not be allowed to use certain words or be limited to a certain number of statements (based on an energy level LOL!) unless brands pay. Or there can be a freemium model of participation.
Anyways, thanks for the news!!
Jeremiah Owyang has talked about conversation aggregation as one possible extension of brands into social media. The idea is simple: Listen to and participate in conversations about your brand on Twitter, Facebook, etc., and also compile those conversations -- in part or in whole -- on your corporate website.
The assumption, of course, is that brands would aggregate only those conversations that are positive or that otherwise build trust and drive sales. What, you thought brand curators would show you the criticisms, too?
With "Brands in Public," Godin and Squidoo may undermine brands' own aggregation efforts. Consumers will likely favor the "balanced" picture of BIP over the manicured snapshot on corporate sites.
What are the implications? Are brands less likely to embrace social engagement on their own sites? Will corporate sites remain static digital brochures? Will brands eschew participation on Twitter, Facebook and other properties in favor of the one-stop response vehicle of Squidoo? Will consumers even gravitate toward Brands in Public? Will BIP offer consumers the real-time search and peer-influence existing platforms offer?
Time will tell...
Nice post - this is pretty interesting - and one of the reasons we (MotiveQuest) don't do dashboards - cause they are going to be free!
I am pretty surprised that Seth Godin is selling the Brands "presence" for $400/month. Guess we'll have to see how that works. For me that sets up some pretty strong cognitive dissonance with my prior understanding of the Seth Godin "Brand".
I'm interested to take a look at a few of the brands on here (where we have done projects) and compare what "Brands in Public" shows about them and what we see with our techniques.
My guess is that there are lots of issues underneath the "Brands in Public" presentation. I think this because if you asked me (or MotiveQuest) to do all the linguistic coding required to:
1 include all the relevant data about Ford + Models and exclude all the irrelevant data and
2. De-Dupe and De-Spam all of that,
It would be a pretty big project. To do this well for hundreds of brands?? Well, you get the difficulty.
Interesting nonetheless.
Tom O'Brien
MotiveQuest LLC
Take a quick look at the Brands in Public page for UPS (the package shipping company) and you'll see that two of the top five stories include:
“Chile central bank UPS credit line . . .”
“Eminem, Public Enemy, Tom Morello Bring All-Star Team-UPS to . . .
It isn’t so easy to exclude the data you don’t want and include the data you do want using (apparently) simple keyword searches. (I guess this is Seth’s business partner’s responsibility – BzzAgent.)
You know what they say – GIGO!
TO'B
To address your question about fairness to the companies to charge them for their voice... Assuming Godin doesn't parse out content created by the company in the various social media channels, which would be lame and I think would damage the reputation of the site, the companies have an equal voice as everyone else does without having to pay a dime. If a company decides to pony up $400 a month they get a stronger voice since their content will take up 2/3 of the page when people view the brand page on Brands In Public.
I'm interested to see how this plays out.
Much of what makes social media great is the ability for the company to respond and participate. This seems like one-way communication unless the company is willing to pony up. As a communications professional, I would want the ability to manage my brand's reputation, but I don't like that I would have to shell out that kind of cash just to participate in the conversation.
Interesting post. Thanks for sharing!
I like the way you dissect Brand in Public with questions. Much better than the rants I'm seeing on twitter. (Although the best tweet so far in response to the controversy has been: "Seth is getting served his own meatball sundae." Clever)
A meta question: What's this going to do to Godin's credibility? Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot. It will be interesting to see what, if any, response there is from BiP. Thanks for the insight.
To me, it will mean more if companies interact directly and not expect consumers to come to them (their owned page) for their own reputation.
How will they make money as a niche community? Selling access to the conversations and data contained within to brands, retailers and other commercial industries.
This will happen before SG gets to aggregate the content and sell access rights to it, so it seems pointless in my eyes. A fairly obvious attempt to monetise social media that anyone could have come up with - come guys, get a little more creative.