“Come up to the lab… and see what’s on the slab.” – Dr. Frankenfurter

It’s been a big, bile-filled week for new application launches and the evil scientists behind them. Both Squidoo’s Brands in Public (another in a long line of brainchildren from Seth Godin,) and Google’s Sidewiki have bloggers and traditional journalists clamouring to dissect and criticize these potentially game-changing additions to our online world. And the villagers are definitely restless.

What is Google Sidewiki?

The latest offering from the Google Labs has been live for a few days now and opinions, especially within the search engine optimization/marketing industry, have been flying fast and furious. Sidewiki has sparked as much debate as any application to ever come out of their underground lair, and that’s hardly surprising considering the massive impact it may prove to have on brand reputation management and other aspects of user-generated discussions in the social sphere.

At its simplest, Sidewiki allows any website visitor to leave a comment about it which is then displayed for any other visitor to read, should they have the capability turned on. Anonymity is not an option, however, so this should greatly reduce the number of participating trolls, rivals and doodie jokes. Reactions from around the web:

Goggle’s new Sidewiki web annotation feature doesn’t allow anonymous commenting, and that is an excellent thing. The Web has been held hostage by anonymous comments for far too long. But, Google is also treating other peoples’ content as its own, and that’s bad. – David Coursey

Somebody should have asked the “is it evil?” question. That’s why it’s there. I sense no one did. – Jeff Jarvis

 

Several of us here at FTS have installed the new toolbar and are getting under Sidewiki’s hood. First impressions seem to all come back to one thing – will the lack of anonymity be enough to keep the new tool useful or will it degenerate into a chorus of moans. As the old adage goes, if someone has a good experience they might share it with one person. If they have a bad experience they will scream it from the rooftops. The jury is understandably out – but the potential for a great addition to the Google toolbox is definitely there.

What is Brands in Public?

Seth Godin, usually heralded as nothing short of a marketing genius, has kicked up a lot of dust with his latest Squidoo-centric baby. Similar to that network’s user-created “lenses”, Brands in Public will allow companies to create and manage the same sort of entity centered around their brand.

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time. – Seth Godin

 

As with a lens, BIP will pull in and syndicate any brand mentions it locates via RSS feeds – news, blog posts, tweets, videos, images, etc. Where the problem for the new service’s detractors lies is its $400 a month price tag. While the hefty cost is a good thing when it comes to making sure the brand-specific real estate is actually owned by its associated company and not an affiliate marketer or competitor, it has also created the impression of extortion among many:

Give Squidoo $400 a month. Or your brand gets it. – Meghan Keane

Wow. I’d personally like to welcome Seth Godin to the world of brand-jacking and hostage taking. I didn’t know you had it in you. – Lisa Barone

 

If you’re a highly visible company Godin and his team intend to create your brand’s dashboard for you. In fact, they probably already have. If you want to have some degree of control over this entity, which will surely end up ranking very well in the search engines for your brand-specific searches, you have to cough up the dough. Monthly membership includes:

• The ability to highlight positive blog/news mentions.
• The ability to respond to negative comments left on the “lens”.
• Being able to interact with your audience via contest and poll modules.

It would also appear that you can make money for charity (or contribute to Squidoo’s bottom line depending on your payment choices) via the Amazon, CafePress, etc. affiliate revenue modules which the network has offered since its inception. It’s Squidoo for brands. At a hefty cost. I don’t like its chances and I think big-business participation will be done begrudgingly as part of an existing online reputation management strategy which will now require an additional $400 a month. I could be wrong, though. There’s always the Stockholm Syndrome to consider.