Brands In Public has brands up in arms
Seth Godin launched his latest project called Brands In Public earlier this week. After some poking around to see what all the fuss was about, two thoughts came to mind.
Firstly, it looked like something that anyone (ok, perhaps a reasonably-skilled Web developer) could easily build – no mind-blowing technology, mostly just publicly-scraped content from sites like Google News, YouTube and Twitter Search. It was, in other words, a really poor looking product by TechCrunch50 standards.
Secondly, Brands In Public appeared to be rather threatening. The idea is interesting enough at first – On the Web, brands cannot control what’s being said about them, so Seth helps out by creating a platform that collects, organizes and publishes public feedback and brand mentions and gets his team to build hundreds of pages; one for each brand. For a fee, companies could access their page and post responses, highlight blog posts and run contests or quizzes. These pages would become the ideal place to organize and respond to positive and negative sentiment in public. Sounds good in theory, but at $4800 a year (0r $400 a month if you prefer) brands with little or no budget would simply be left out of the conversation. If they couldn’t pay, they couldn’t control their page.
Wait a minute, didn’t Seth Godin write a book about permission marketing?
I’m sorry but that sounds a lot like extortion to me, not to mention a PR nightmare for unsuspecting brands who suddenly find themselves on a list that Seth decides to “put in public”. If you’re on that list, you should be worried. Seth has just put a lightning rod on your house and wants to sell you the grounding wire.
UPDATE 28/9: Seth Godin’s team at Squidoo has taken down the pages in response to public outcry (see this, this and this)
So how could he have done it differently? Here are a few ideas:
Give it away for free and go freemium by charging for advanced features like customizable layouts, self-hosting and push alerts. Or if the whole idea was just to make a point, he could charge a ridiculously high fee (how does $10000 a month sound?) and watch the discussions explode all over the Web. After which he could simply say it was an experiment to prove a point, have the pundits singing his praises and still have some traction for his product.
But then of course, I’m not Seth Godin.
Your thoughts?
P.S. I still love his books 
Photo credit: Sanglui Zuhtam
