Seth can't get his new business venture onto the front page of the NYT by himself, after all -- he needs your legal department to make that happen. The rest of the Fortune 500 will promptly DDOS his order takers with their credit card numbers when that gets published. He'll also collect tens of thousands of links, many of them from authority sites such as TechCrunch, Slashdot, Consumerist, the newspapers which take direction from the NYT, etc etc, and as a result rank much better for other brands than he had previously.
If they're stupid, hopefully they're not so stupid that they'll ignore the lawyers who will say there is not even a scintilla of a case.
[Edit: Its not letting me respond because the site is worried I'm flaming you, which is totally not my intent.
In sum, litigation is a last-resort dispute resolution mechanism which you use to achieve business goals. Litigation here will not achieve business goals. On a totally separate level, which is academically interesting but only that, BigCo would be unlikely to prevail with a claim of trademark infringement.
There is no danger of confusion between Ford and Ford In Public -- it says "unofficial", prominently. There is no cognizable commercial damage -- Seth is not trying to sell cars. If you were a particularly bad trademark lawyer, you might argue that someone saying bad things about your brand causes you damage, but that cuts against a finding of trademark infringement, because it tends to demonstrate that the mark is being used, take your pick, transformatively, for identification ("nominative use"), and for purposes of commentary.
But, again, first rule of law for programmers: law is not program code, and litigation is not executing an algorithm. It is a negotiating tactic.]
It's illegal to try to pass yourself off as someone affiliated with or endorsed by someone when that's not the case by using their trademark. The five instances of the word "unofficial" all displayed prominently above the fold on the Squidoo pages should take care of that.
Besides, Squidoo.com isn't an authority domain, and its "lenses" don't rank for anything on Google.
I personally found it extremely annoying when one of my projects was ranking first on aboutus as a simple stub.
His blog is not much respected.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294
It's a website that mentions other brands. So does Yelp and any other local search service. Business and Finance Websites. Not to mention all the [brand]sucks.com websites.
http://www.squidoo.com/kfc-in-public isn't anymore brand-jacking of KFC than http://outspokenmedia.com/reputation-management/seth-godin-b... is brandjacking of Seth Godin.
The only way to effectively do this is to make the alternative, leaving control of the page to Squidoo, a bad idea for the brandholder.
All legality issues aside (and I don't believe there are many), either Squidoo decides to showcase the less desirable side of a brand in hopes of getting money, or they don't make money because the brandholders are satisfied with the way their page looks.
It is totally different from Yelp, who collects business reviews independently of the business owner. It is different from XXXXXsucks.com sites, which do not offer to remove certain content for a fee. It is different from local search sites, whose purpose is to collect as many business addresses as possible in hope of SEO.
Just like GetSatisfaction, this is a protection racket. You pay, or you lose something valuable -- "maybe". Without the "maybe", the operation loses its teeth. With the "maybe", the operation loses its ethics.
If you assume evil, don't be surprised if that turn out to be the conclusion.
> this is a protection racket. You pay, or you lose something valuable
Well, any sale can be spun that way, with the something valuable being the good on sale.
What isn't demonstrated is the intent that not controlling your brands -in-focus page is damaging, rather than the neutral option.
The premise of this product is that the discussion is already happening, and than such a page can be somehow used to control it. That indicates that not buying would be neutral.
Granted, I can't see what I'd use such a page for, but then again, I'm not a brand manager.
> Just like GetSatisfaction
As I recall the GetSatisfaction debacle, they were essentially passing themselves of as agents of the brand. This is not an issue here.
Would you mind explaining this?
On the other hand, if you engage in underhanded business tactics and don't really care about your customers, you'll have a much harder time controlling the public opinion. Microsoft has been fighting this battle for a long time, and sometimes the results are quite comical. See the Seinfeld/Gates commercial for an example.
Big companies are concerned about their image. The net does change how PR is done, and no-one yet knows how to do it. So making that problem managable is an important contribution. Let's be clear: for a big company, $400 pcm is a rounding error for PR expense. The real question is whether that expense will actually do them any good. And so we move to execution:
The info on the actual pages is not helpful. There's no way to get a sense of "what is being said". It's almost as confusing as trying to get the info by browsing the net. I think a solution would be something like "google trends/news for social media". For example, amazon's PR problem isn't apparent at all: http://www.squidoo.com/amazon-in-public In fact, it looks like mostly amazon PR. For it to be taken seriously, the raw information needs to be clear and neutral (like Google not having pay-for-placement search results).
But the biggest problem is whether anyone will actually look at these pages, apart from PR departments. Consumers don't use brands like that. Before you buy a Coke, do you usually have the urge to see how their branding is going? Possibly, bloggers/reporter will use it, and will see the PR response at the same time, and therefore it helps disseminate the company's message.
But the problem/opportunity is real, and this suggests a startup: a google-for-brands. The technical challenge is to work out how to extract the relevant, valuable information; the marketing challenge is to get known (e.g. quoted by bloggers, by news services). Then, you can work out a way to charge for it. Perhaps like a Gallup poll; or a newswire service.
Over the last few months, we've seen big brands (like Amazon and Maytag) get caught in a twitterstorm.
Not only do I consider Seth's move unethical, but it's lame too.
If that information is tampered by the underlying company, then people will probably want less of it. If companies want to pay Seth to put up alongside that content, how is that bad or wrong? Isn't that just like having sponsored links alongside Google SERPs?
Has Google 'brandjacked' IBM if it allows sponsored links next to IBM related search lookups, especially if those links are to Dell's site? Thus if Godin has brandjacked, then Google definitely has. Also, Google spiders IBM's websites to get this information. The result: IBM can advertise next to Dell's SERPs and Microsoft and others can compete with Google.
Why get angry? It's just a freakin' mashup. It's not like he's letting competitors to cross-post on one another's listings.
If Godin starts to make money, then competitors will come.
His site is like Alltop - a commodity service, nothing special, but there's probably only enough room in the market for 1.
People who are angry or jealous, don't get mad, get even and compete, there's nothing so far unethical I've seen.
(edit: in fact if he really want to cause a stir, why not just let competitors trash each other on each other's pages? So far that's not possible, and props to him for not allowing it, I could easily see that happening in competitive markets.)
Basically, "curated" pages become useless. Non-curated pages might be useful, but I'm not going to trust a site whose business model depends on "pay us to take down negative reviews."
This isn't an ethical issue, it's just a big gaping hole in the business model.
But by ransoming control of the page to the brand he's gone awry. Are we to assume that if Allstate pays the $400/month they can censor whatever they like on the page? If so, that destroys the value of the site completely, and it does start to seem more like brandjacking. But more than anything, this strikes me as a ham-fisted attempt to make the hapless Squidoo.com relevant.
Also, a lot is being made of the SEO play here, and in my opinion its much ado about nothing. Squidoo pages haven't ranked for anything in years, as any noob at Digital Point forums will tell you. And they shouldn't - the majority are meaningless aggregations of unoriginal content thrown together by a user who will never update it again, or an amateur SEO wasting their time trying to get a free dofollow link.
Anyways, I don't see anything about this that's as horribly unethical as the picture the article is trying to paint. It's certainly not as bad as the Get Satisfaction fiasco, where GS was doing everything short of directly claiming to be an official support channel for companies that had no affiliation. This is just a lame aggregation with a lamer business model. I'm more disappointed in Seth for a lack of creativity, style, and value.
There is no extortion here unless Seth is flat-out lying about how the site works. He states that all of the content on the page is algorithmically generated [1], and no human has editorial control.
The lack of editorial control also applies to the brand. Even if they pay the $400 / month, they only get control over the left-hand column [2] and nothing states or implies that they have the ability to take down negative comments. In fact, it seems very clear that they cannot take it down.
The main use I can see for this site is for people doing research on a purchase--e.g., checking to see if a Canon PowerShot XS10 is a good camera for them. Even then, I would probably go to something more focused, like ePinions.com.
[1] "Each page collects [online content] about a brand. All of these feeds are algorithmic... the good and the bad show up[....]"
[2] And once [Squidoo builds] the page, the left hand column belongs to you. [...] You can publicly have your say right next to the constant stream of information about your brand[....]"
The way I see it this brand site would be more interesting for the marketing/public relations department of a company that wants to see every discussion about them in one place and jump to the actual content where they want to reply, and not as interesting a page for other people outside the company.
Therefore it's a good free service for customers.
It also may become good service for companies because as massive amount of people starts using his site to get information about brands, he offers the companies cheap way to cover up their errors for large part of their potential customers.
Guy is a genius and Lisa Barone just doesn't get it. Being Chief Branding Officer probably makes you angry about anything that may help customers recognize true value of brands.
