Do Public Brands Need Brands In Public?

Posted by Stephanie Startz on September 25, 2009 05:32 PM

Seth Godin thinks he has an offer you can't refuse: pay him $400 a month and save your brand's reputation. This week, the author, entrepreneur and self-described agent of change announced Squidoo's launch of Brands in Public, a site with unofficial pages aggregating brand mentions on Twitter, YouTube and blogs. Brands that fork over cash are allowed to "curate" the page, and one expects, replace negative content with positive feedback.

Godin's site has come under scrutiny, notably from online consultant Lisa Barone, who accused Godin of "brandjacking." Barone sees the service as redundant: "nothing more than a 5k a year public Google Alert." These redundancies are the sources from which Brands in Public collects their data: Twitter, Google News, and blogs -- sources consumers may be far more familiar with than they are with Brands in Public.

According to Econsultancy, Brands in Public is hamstrung by its limited search engine optimization:

The immediate problem is that none of these pages have top SERPs and for generic searches like "Walmart" or "Home Depot", they're not likely to ever rank where it matters (read: first page). Long-term, even if Brand in Public pages do achieve decent ranks, none of these major brands is realistically going to gain or lose customers because a page with a hodgepodge of aggregated user-generated content has something negative on it. Just ask Walmart; there is already plenty of "Walmart sucks" content with top SERPs and the company still manages to get by.

Godin's positioning implies that the communication and marketing departments at major corporations are lost in the Internet wilderness, when the opposite is increasingly true. Brands are not only effectively monitoring conversations on Twitter, but engaging users. If a brand wants to create a "fan" page, they can easily make their own, and probably yield a higher SEO. Ford's fiestamovement.com, with real-time tweets, videos, pictures and blog posts from "agents" test driving Ford Fiestas, uses web design light-years ahead of Brands in Public.

Godin seems to be missing some of the irony: In order to shape public consensus about a brand, one must first be a trustworthy brand.

More about: Seth Godin, Brands In Public, Squidoo, Twitter, Google News, Ford, Ford Fiesta, Econsultancy

Steve Russell says:

After years of offering free stuff with a catch, I guess Seth finally has realized that love don't pay the rent...or hosting fees.

Godin has been a major proponent of good marketing on the web, but perhaps with Brands In Public he's decided that infomercials sell soap — his soap. I do feel he's using his good name to ill use. And he's not alone.

An acquaintance of mine, a self-proclaimed queen of the bloggers, came to me about 6 months ago with one of her projects: "Pay me $3,500 and I'll do a puff piece about you on my new CEO profiling website. If I say you're cool, you're cool. It's gonna be great...you need it!"

Uh, no, I don't, thank you very much. These top bloggers seriously need to get over themselves.

Besides all this, the Brands In Public websites are the most banal, drab, butt-ugly websites I have seen in a long time.

September 28, 2009 04:19 AM #

Ksenia Coffman says:

Well, if you consider the possibility that Godin *aimed* to create the uproar, and they say "oops, there's been a misunderstanding, it was all supposed to be *sample* pages - then maybe he's been smarter about the situation than we give him credit for. The result -- the poor schmucks are signing up for the $400/mo service! Whatever.

September 28, 2009 08:47 PM #

Gina Miller says:

Brands in Public would have been innovative just a few years ago, but now it's somewhat behind the times. Big brands need to be able to see the big picture of what's happening out there, and drill down to how to use the sentiment to strategically steer their company and products. There are much better tools for that already available - and they're priced in fair proportion to the value they provide. I may be wrong, but I suspect that Brands in Public is a tool that only the naivest of big brands may think to be relevant to them. And I also suspect that when they're reviewing their expenditures and realize they haven't driven $5000 worth of value for themselves, they won't renew. Smaller brands may think it's worth the annual fee to perhaps lift their search results or expose their brand name to a new audience. But... there are better tools out there for that, too.

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