A few days ago I saw an announcement for a new marketing site called Brands in Public. The site is owned by marketing guru Seth Godin. The full announcement is here. What I didn’t get was what the strategy was behind the site? The deal was a bunch of top brands, including Microsoft, were each represented with their own brand page. Brands In Public created a social aggregation site for each big brand without any involvement, or permission, from the brand. If a brand wanted to participate or moderate their own brand page they had to pay $400 a month to become a sponsor. While I completely agree that no brand can control what people are going to say about their brand I was shocked that a marketing expert now wanted to charge me money to participate in a conversation about my own brand. As a brand marketer it felt a bit like extortion.
TechCrunch gives the play-by-play on how Seth and his company Squidoo have since changes their policy. Apparently more than a few brand marketers didn’t like the idea of Seth hijacking their brand and then charging them to get it back. For me I have to say that part of the program didn’t sit well with me either. Squidoo wanted to charge a brand money to monitor and moderate a page that they never asked for in the first place. How is that great marketing?? They hijacked my brand and then wanted me to pay to play.
But in all honestly what struck me as even more odd was that he thought my customer would come to a 3rd party ‘marketing’ site to have a conversation about my brand. How would someone that wanted to have a conversation about Microsoft or Windows know to go to BrandsInPublic.com/Microsoft? This seems really off to me. I see a lot of value in bringing the social conversation to one place for a customer and the social media hub concept we are building for Win7 launch does exactly that, but it’s on our own domains, Windows.com and Microsoft.com which is where our customer go. The best place to aggregate conversation about your brand is to do it where your community already lives. Whether that’s a Facebook community, your brand website or a Ning community it should be where your community is already congregating.
I’m not a fan of creating a new destination site a brand marketer now has to drive traffic to. Who’s going to invest in driving traffic to a 3rd party site that doesn’t do anything to move the customer through the sales cycle? It’s hard enough to continuously promote websites and fan pages. I don’t want to take on the added burden of dissecting my web traffic even further by sending them to a separate website. My new criteria is to not invest in programs or website that don’t allow me to build an ongoing community I can reach out to again and again. The program would only meet one of my decision criteria (inspire brand favorability) so it doesn’t make the grade for me. I wasn’t planning on paying the $400 a month, but I guess it doesn’t matter now.
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