I love the idea of conversational marketing, and applaud the innovators who are trying to figure out more scalable ways to put it into action. A tweet today from Jeremiah Owyang led me to an interesting new offering from marketing pundit Seth Godin, one that puts brands in a social media context.
A Provocative Idea
Agent provocateur Seth Godin has just stirred up the pot with his new offering, Brands in Public. His intent is to provide a place where brands can “coördinate and organize the conversation” about the brand: the good, the bad and the ugly.
If his concept takes off, brands will appear within a public exchange, hosted by his company, Squidoo. Feeds from multiple sources of user-generated content will be aggregated and organized in real time – resulting in a semi-automated brand portal. The brand owner will have the opportunity to provide commentary, clarification, rebuttals, etc.
The key point here is that the consumers own the conversation; the brand’s role is to respond or provide context for interpretation.
As Seth explains in the introductory blog post,
…It’s not behind your firewall and not something that has to fit into the larger über-corporate strategy. More like a tradeshow and less like your home page. It’s in public. It’s simply a place for your brand to see and be seen, to organize and to respond.
The Devil Is in the Details
I like the concept, but believe adoption will hinge upon the quality of the execution. If the feeds are 100% programmatic, I predict the brand exchange will wither away due to problems with the signal-to-noise ration – especially for brands whose names are common terms, like Apple or Orange.
I checked out the Apple brand page. There are some interesting links and user comments, but also a lot of irrelevant tweets about apple pie recipes, pork and apple dinners, etc. (So much so that I’m unlikely to check out that page again – even though I am a long-time Apple enthusiast.)
Buried in all the UGC are some rough diamonds, but you’ve got to do a lot of sifting to find the gems. How many people are willing to expend the energy?
Results were slightly better with SAP’s brand page, where the conflict with common terminology is less of an issue.
My experience with clients reinforces my notion that the signal-to-noise ratio is a critical success factor, even for brands that just want to monitor the conversations.
As a case in point: One of my clients has already spent weeks with the help of an analyst team to ensure that their listening platform, provided by TNS Cymfony, correctly distinguishes the relevant user content from the false matches. Like Apple my client’s brand name comprises common English words, so false matches are frequent. It’s taken a lot of fine-tuning to weed out the chaff.
For the Squidoo service to take off, I believe there needs to be a similar intelligent filtering mechanism – one that is automated for scalability’s sake. Brand owners will need to weigh in to help fine-tune the filtering mechanism.
Otherwise the aggregated content is compelling neither for brand enthusiasts nor brand owners. And thus a potentially good concept will not succeed.
Good luck, Squidoo. I hope you can solve the signal-to-noise ratio.
Revised on September 30, 2009
