Matt Hendrick's Blog

The old adage goes something like, "There's no such thing as bad publicity, as long as they spell your name right". If that's truly the case, then I'd love to hear the thoughts inside the inner circle of Seth Godin's latest venture, Brands in Public, which went live just last week. If you haven't heard, Brands in Public is a website which aggregates many of the public conversations surrounding a given brand, and displays them in one location. Sounds great, right? Well, maybe not... if you're the brand. Brands in Public launched with the plan to create brand "pages" on their own, without the prior consent of a given brand, and then charge companies $400/month for the ability to "own" their page, thus allowing them to manage the content. This created quite an uproar across the social media spectrum, including allegations of "brandjacking", and in response, Brands in Public backed away from their initial plan, now planning to only create pages for brands which have opted into their user agreement. This may have tempered some of the initial public outcry, but I believe the situation highlights many of the questions which top brands are pondering internally in recent times. How can we best engage past, current, and future customers online? Which social tools should we embrace, and which should we shy away from? And most importantly - how can we translate all of this effort into new customers and sales growth?

In today's world, there are the few social business essentials that all brands should treat with the same regard as their homepage URL - a Facebook Fan Page, Twitter username, and Yelp Business page, which all serve as important communication channels to reach different segments of potential (and existing) customers. These tools can't guarantee that the conversation will always be positive, but they do allow brands to actively participate in the public discourse, and when appropriate, engage their detractors. We all know by now that we can't control the conversation surrounding our brand, but we can manage it - by promoting our objectives, highlighting our successes, and responding to our critics. Where I differ from Seth Godin's approach is in how we manage it - and more specifically where we manage it.