Brands In Public? Don’t Do Them Any Favors.

Saw today that Seth Godin launched a new service called Brand In Public. You can read his blog post explaining it here. I first became aware of it through a tweet by @LisaBarone. Her blog post “Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking” about it is here. Another good commentary on the Brands In Public launch by Ike Pigott on Media Bullseye is here.

I’m not sure if @LisaBarone is right to call it brand jacking but Brands In Public sure is odd and probably not very useful. It’s one of those projects that seems to idealistic for its own good. And the more I think about it the more your competition might find Godin’s Brands In Public just as useful as you do.

At first glimpse Brand In Public is a great research tool for brands wanting to see how people react to their business. You can get a full compliment of real time search news and information from a variety of sources on the web on particular brands aggregated onto one page. I think it can be valuable for case studies or brand research. I can think of many ways this web service could be valuable but not for one brand to buy into. In fact this would be a negative for many brands because what Godin proposes is a solution to a problem that he’s creating for you.

Brands would rather watch the commentary from behind the veil and comment on it when appropriate and in the public space under their own terms. While everyone touts the open and transparent mindset of Web 2.0 where no business can “control the message or conversation anymore” I’m not sure that taking all that and putting it in one place is a good thing for any business. Why make it easier for people who want to attack you? Why pay anyone for the privilege making it easier for people to aggregate the conversation? For many businesses that’s a very scary concept.

Even the most beloved brands with lofty ideals may fall victim to someone’s dirty tricks or a misunderstanding or a misstep in marketing. Why then make it a branded space for people to go and watch the train wreck take place? If I’m going to respond publicly to a marketing guffaw or a PR nightmare then I’d take it to the place where people are talking about it, like Facebook or Twitter or my blog. I’m not going to create an infinite feedback loop for the message by telling people to go to the Brands In Public aggregation page to see my reaction. My reaction can stand by itself and I can try to disseminate that through the public media outlets available to me. That’s one of the benefits businesses have in adopting social media into their marketing and trying very hard to maintain a sincere conversation.

I’ sell the whole service to a business blog or news organization for $400 per month for unrestricted access to this stuff. But would I as a brand pay $400 per month to react on Seth Godin’s space to negative tweets or highlight positive ones? No. I might hire him and pay him a one time fee to build this out on my website which I can host. If I need him to tweak it, I’ll be in touch. That way I own the space and can direct people back to it to get the transparent story on what’s going on. I’d use it as a dashboard for PR purposes. But I wouldn’t pay someone else the privilege building an off site aggregator of commentary about my business on the web to have them host it. Even then it’s sort of weak. Why? Look what happened to Skittles. A high-minded concept with its heart in the right pace but in execution it failed because the Twitter stream was too vulnerable to spam and trolls. If I really wanted to do this, it seems any good programmer can create this for you for cheap, except Seth Godin isn’t driving traffic to it. I’d much rather higher a social media monitoring service. That way I can choose the conversations I can react to under my own strategic terms. If I have a place where people venting can feed off each other this is libel to spiral right out of control. A minor dust up can grow into a tornado. I’d spend all my time watching all these feeds on the dashboard feeling I have to react to each one, good or bad.

It’s bad enough marketers for brands have to spend their day googling “Brand X Sucks” or setting up Google alerts and Twitter searches for the same. Why then go an encourage someone to put it all in one place and publish it on the web, for goodness sake?

Please, don’t do them any favors.