I recently came across an interesting post on Springwise.com titled “Portals for brand conversations, led by brands“. Launched by Seth Godin, Brands in Public is a new site that aggregates all those diverse conversations on the web and presents them through a unified public-facing dashboard that gives any brand the chance to lead the discussion….for a price ($400/month).
At first this seemed like an interesting idea to me. However, when you look beyond the “Seth Godin Hype Machine” and actually spend some time looking at the brand dashboards, there is nothing that exists that brands could not easily execute themselves on their own domains (where I believe the conversation really needs to take place).
The site is powered by Squidoo, and brand pages are nothing more than a collection of feeds that are pulled from Twitter, Google News, Google Trends, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! News, Quantcast, and Bzzscapes. There is some embedded functionality like threaded conversations and twitter sentiment analysis. Each brand page also has embedded feeds from the brands own blogs.
So my question….why here? I just can’t get past the reason why a brand would spend $400/month to post messages here as opposed to engaging in the conversation via their branded web assets or directly where the conversation is taking place. What do you think?
Jeremi Karnell
President, One to One Interactive
http://www.onetooneinteractive.com
If that platform gets REALLY popular then it would be worth it. BUT, with all the buzz and rise of real-time rss and such, users will probably start using their own tools to search and brows info. Then a brand will have to own the convo on their own territory.
-M