Seth Godin, the popular new media pundit and blogger, has caused yet another controversy this week. His obscure start-up, Squidoo, which lets users create custom pages around their interests, announced a new initiative called “Brands in Public.” The idea is that companies can no longer control everything that’s created around their brands in the age of Twitter and YouTube. So Squidoo will aggregate all the content and let company’s organize that data in a positive light.
Godin got trouble, however, when his firm went ahead and created a bunch of “unofficial” brand pages (click here to see Trader Joe’s page, as a sample) without the permission of the companies behind them. As you might imagine, the backlash has been swift (and Godin now says they’ll delete these pages). Online-marketing consultant Lisa Barone labeled the venture “brandjacking” because Godin will “extort 5k a year” from companies so they can control a page they probably wouldn’t want anyways. The monitoring tools on Squidoo’s public platform are not that complex; what you are really paying for is “hush money” on pages that could rank highly on search engine results.
It’s all quite ironic since Godin claims to be the father of “Permission Marketing,” the theory that customers will only respect brands that respectfully ask them to opt-in to receiving any company communications.
But the reality is that Godin’s approach is not that novel and many internet companies he admires on his blog already depend on some form of “brandjacking.” In fact, it’s the business plan of nearly all the Web 2.0 companies that don’t charge users for their services. Let the crowd create the content, build a platform to aggregate and organize that data and then charge companies if they don’t like the results. Good luck telling Google or Yelp that you want to opt-out of their listings. Your company has been “brandjacked” all over the web whether you like it or not and you’re going to have to pay to put your ad above the rest.
But why would you want to opt-out of Google, you may ask? Well, if you’ve ever Googled your name, perhaps you’ve seen a profile created on your behalf on directory parasites like Spoke.com or 123people.com. It’s the same shady deal. Those sites claim they are doing you a favor by connecting you to other professionals. But I can already connect with my network through better tools like LinkedIn and Facebook. If I want people to know my email address or phone number, I can list it. So when I saw that Spoke.com’s spiders had scoured the web and listed an email account, phone number and bio related to me at a company I no longer work for, I emailed them and told them that the info was not accurate and that I wanted them to immediately delete this profile. Their response: You need to log in and waste your time before you can opt-out. This was quite frustrating. As a matter of principle, why should companies be able to exploit your brand or your person for commercial purposes without your permission?
