Comments on: Squiddo, Brands in Public & the risks of aggregation blackmail

By: Alex Beattie

Alex Beattie — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:20:54 +0000

Hey Dan. Still an avid reader of viralhosingfix.com. I especially like your 'good reads' posts.

You ought to consider building a Squidoo lens for this blog. I'd be happy to help if you'd like, though it's relatively simple.

Happy New Year! And again, I love your insights.

By: Alex Beattie

Alex Beattie — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:20:54 +0000

By: danielrmccarthy

danielrmccarthy — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:36:19 +0000

Thanks for weighing in Alex. The mention of “thousands” of brand pages is quoted directly from Seth's blog. Your points are well-taken, and a service like Brands in Public can be a significant aid to companies that are working to keep tabs on all of the mentions of their brands in multiple places. The larger issue of how disparate dialogues will get organized, for the consumer and the brand, is clearly fluid; SideWiki adds yet another wrinkle to the mix. My point of view tends toward finding ways to aggregate the content and make the process of participating in the conversation more efficient for a brand. One key point of efficiency is being able to participate in the conversation in the place where the conversation is taking place. Today, and most likely for the foreseeable future, that mean logging and and participating on multiple conversation platforms. By creating an aggregation point of the brand-related content, including conversations, and allowing for conversation in a meta-platform, ultimately a service creates another layer of reputation management, even while providing a point of convenience in gathering the disparate content.

By: alexbeattie

alexbeattie — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:27:11 +0000

Dan,

Interesting post. I am, however, unclear as to what you found to be flawed about Brands in Public. You start with the risks of aggregation blackmail which is clearly provocative, if not an impeachment of the service that Squidoo and Brands in Public were offering.

I've interpreted your conclusion to be this:

The Brands in Public service does speak to one important rule for Brands in the Web 2.0 universe. Each brand needs to have its own social footprint, developed and executed using social media tools. This footprint should have frequently-changing content, should allow for consumer engagement and should be driven by a content-marketing strategy.

Correct me if you are wrong, but your views on social media seem to be in line with the service. As for this line:

By creating thousands of these pages, and then setting up signposts for all the search engine crawlers...

... you're just wrong. It wasn't thousands, and in no place did anyone from Brands in Public or Squidoo say that. Perhaps you should go through Seth's Blog post again.

And, you point to 2 flaws: 1) That Seth, the founder of Squidoo, doesn't allow comments, and that a basic underlying premise of social media is that anyone has the right to contribute or respond... This is a red herring and has nothing to do with the service. As a publisher, you should know this. Everything in your publications can not possibly align with your world view or ideals. He does explain why he doesn't accept comments, and you are correct, it is rational. It can be found here 2) The other flaw you point to are its limited abilities, which place limits on its value. I don't know if you tested one of the pages with your brand and found that to be true or you are jumping to a conclusion. As far as I'm concerned neither of the flaws are well founded.

Just thought I'd point this out to you—Mainly because of your reasoning (as well as a gaggle of other blogger's reasoning).

This, Dan, is in fact (if there is one) an underlying premise of social media: That anyone with an internet connection can publish now—which indeed was the service Brands in Public was offering.

It would have been worthy of noting in Seth's post this blockquote:

If you have the tools and wherewithal to build a page like this on your own site, you should consider that. The challenge is getting it done, regardless of where the page lives.

Other than those few things... I do agree that not managing your brand will set you adrift in the content of social media...

P.S. You mentioned Yelp... you might want to do a quick search "yelp controversary"