It occurred to me that there were 3 notable launches last week.

On Wednesday, Seth Godin announced the launch of Brands in Public which describes itself as a collection of interesting, accessible, public-facing dashboards for your favorite brands. Each dashboard is a Squidoo Lens, aggregating content and opinions from other sites such as Wikipedia, Amazon, Flickr, Yahoo, Twitter and the Blogospere in general. Squidoo doesn’t purport to have created any of the content itself, it’s merely a convenient way of viewing (viz. a lens) this information in one place. All the content would be easily discoverable by going to a few specific websites and spending a bit of time on Google.

The response was largely positive but a certain amount of backlash prompted a follow-up from Seth at the end of the week, the upshot being the some of the Lenses were removed from the site. In Seth’s own words:

“other people didn’t like elements of it. And they were direct in letting me know.”

Meanwhile, I was alerted to the relatively innocuous launch of Google Sidewiki by a twitter post from Jeremiah Owyang.  Having emerged from Google Labs, Sidewiki “allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage” if, that is, you use Firefox or IE with the Google Toolbar installed.

Internet users without the requisite toolbar can still see Sidewiki content as it is simply just HTML content hosted on the Google site. For example, Jeremiah followed up his post by contributing a Sidewiki entry of his own. I think that we can expect to see Sidewiki content appearing in Google search results at some point in the near future.

The most important consequence of this is stated by Jeremiah:

“recognize that you don’t own your corporate website –your customers do”

In essence, Sidewiki allows any other internet user to post content on top of your own website. For everything that you post online, Google has kindly provided a built-in comments facility whether you want it or not.

The cynic in me would argue that this came about in an attempt to usurp Twitter from its current top spot as the commenting (and moaning) medium of choice. Otherwise, why else would Google release an API so that third-party developers can leverage the content posted on Sidewiki? You can tell it’s helped Twitter along by the mryiad applications that connect with their platform.

This leads me on to the third launch of the week. OneForty is “A Better Way to Discover Twitter Apps” although I’m not quite sure why “to” is the only word not to warrant capitalization. What it boils down to is an App Store for Twitter – a place for application developers to promote their apps and for Twitter users to review them.

It’s remarkably easy to use, in part because it uses the OAuth protocol to seamlessly connect you to the Twitterverse, but also due to a very well put together site. I would like someone to explain to me exactly what their favicon is meant to be though.

The response to OneForty has been overwhelmingly positive. With over 1500 apps leveraging the Twitter platform it was both difficult for users to discover ways to get the most out of their Twitter account and even more difficult for app developers to promote their product to the right people.  OneForty allows app developers to say “we have a product” and then people can say “we love it” or “we hate it” or even write a mini essay critiquing its finer points.

You can see it’s not a million miles away from what Sidewiki set out to achieve so one wonders why the latter received so much negative publicity. My guess is that it’s the same reason why the objectors to Brands in Public were quick to have their pages removed:

No one wants to hear bad things said about them.

They don’t want to have a conversation that they can’t control so it leads to a one-sided adoption of social media, but leaving out the social part. A marketer that does this becomes the bore at the party – only talking about themselves. It’s no wonder that there is so little trust for corporate blogs. It’s a shame that they don’t take a leaf out of the other two sites. Seth Godin is an evangelist for permission marketing, and the point of Brands in Public is to provide a vehicle for corporate entities to see what the Internet is saying about them and then respond accordingly. Seth’s response to those that don’t want to be a part of it is understandable – we’ll just shut you down and make room for those that do want to be a part of it. At the other end of the spectrum in OneForty, where the brands themselves are embracing the opportunity to be talked about and to engage their customers in conversations. Hell, OneForty itelft tried to engage its customers by providing its very own Sidewiki in the form of a UserVoice forum, which allows users to directly comment on the site they are using. The best thing about this is that OneForty has and will listen to the feedback that they are given.

I don’t know if Google Sidewiki will be a good or a bad thing for the Internet, but I do know that it will move the goalposts because there isn’t a brand big enough to convince Google to take the facility of their individual website, and as a consequence corporate brands will have to follow Jeremiah’s advice:

“Don’t be reactive to negative content – embrace social content now.”

I hope they do, as all too often the standard corporate response to something that isn’t part of their programme is:

“Shut them down; or shut them up; at least shut the door and hide under the desk.”

and at the end of the day that benefits nobody.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.