Brands in public is a new service from Squidoo and Seth Godin and basically equates to a page with aggregated content from various sources such as Google, Twitter and Yahoo. Pretty simple concept and extremely simple to do, I could build one of these pages in twenty minutes and almost anyone could build their own with a service such as FriendFeed in a very short amount of time with a bit of research. But the kicker is Squidoo are charging brands $400 a month to curate these pages. $400! Brands, give me £50 and I’ll whip you up one of these bad boys in no time at all with better quality and more information. In fact, ask any web developer and I’m sure they would be delighted to take a fraction of that $3000 a year to let you edit a one page website.

What I don’t get is how so many brands have already signed up to this. There are plenty of brand reputation management tools out there that have more features for a fraction of the price. Are they worried about bad press on their squidoo page? Get over it and spend the $400 a month on customer service. Its true that to most big brands $400 a month is nothing but Seth Godin has hit a goldmine here and props to him. It’s proof that once you get your name out there it’s easy to pass off a simple and cheap product as something brands need. He’s a genius, there’s no denying that, and you know full well that he knows that this product is ridiculously priced but he also knows people will pay for it because they think they need it. Because Mr Godin told them so.

More elsewhere:

http://econsultancy.com/blog/4682-brands-in-public-forget-brandjacking-it-s-really-about-value

No related posts.