Written by Thilde Vesterby
Seth Godin’s company Squidoo recently launched a new reputation management tool called Brand In Public. The service provides an online dashboard that pulls together the latest news and conversation about a brand from sources such as Google Blogsearch, Google News, Yahoo! News, Twitter, BackType, Google Search Trends and Quantcast.
When (or rather if) large brands decide to sponsor or adopt their own account (for a steep $400 a month) they can organise conversations and news about them on the Internet – in public. As Godin says:
“You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.”
For $400 a month the brand gets to control 2/3 of the screen on their profile where they can highlight blog posts, run contests, post videos or whatever they want.
There has been a lot of discussion about Godin’s new tool around the Internet as many are sceptical manly due to fear of ’brandjacking’ and a mild form of extortion.
The criticism arose because of Godin’s decision to actively set up 200 of these Brands In Public profiles before launch without the consent of the companies involved. The companies would be locked out of the profiles until they decided to sign up and pay up for the almost $5,000 a year service. At which time the profiles would be unlocked. Some would call it brandjacking, others may call it good old-fashioned extortion, with online branding effectively taken hostage with a price on its head for release.
A couple of days after announcing his plans for Brands In Public, Godin took the criticism into consideration and made the service opt-in rather than opt-out.
It will be interesting to follow the new tool and see how many large brands actually sign up for the service and decide to maintain their reputation trough Brands In Public.
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