Recently marketing wizard Seth Godin launched a new addition to community site Squidoo. Brands in Public is a shared dashboard of Web activity related major brands, meant to bring brand monitoring into the public eye. So why would businesses want to bring brand monitoring out into the light of day? Godin has a great answer as part of his pitch:
There are already monitoring tools online (like Radian6) that allow big brands to watch from behind the scenes. That’s great, but what are you doing in front of your audience? Is there a low-cost, easy way to let one of your non-technical marketing people lead and engage with people who are already in the conversation?
There have certainly been plenty of people very unhappy concerning the way Godin and Squidoo have gone about Brands in Public. But the ethos behind the site is one we agree with, even if we have a different approach.
At AboutUs we don’t automatically aggregate customer comments about your company, though the new look for our pages does include quick links to brand mentions on Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.
More importantly, we believe that it’s not just big name brands like Amazon and IKEA that deserve a place to interact with people and describe their presence on the Web. Anyone with a domain can use AboutUs to promote their organization and start a conversation with customers. We also provide a level playing field for all, and do not charge any fee to participate in a page that talks about your brand.
Every AboutUs page is a digital public square that can help you start a constructive dialog with your customers. We’re committed to being free and open to everyone on the Web, in order to create a useful resource that abides by the values of our community.
{ 5 comments }
Would someone explain to me why several of the links on my website have been replaced by http://www.aboutus.org/WebAddressHere.com? I had never heard of this site until it apparently hijacked my site.
Hi, you guys keep spamming my website, so I thought I’d drop by and say hello! Your comments are always so full of insight and you always post the same You Tube video of unlocking an iPhone. So creative and unique! Thank you so much for your interest in my business. Ha!
The way he went about it is the same way you go about it, surprised you even touched on this subject.
Hi Valerie,
Are you sure you don’t have us confused with another website? AboutUs.org provides information about domains on the Web, so a lot of people confuse our pages with the actual website for an organization. In other words, we don’t spam anyone, we just have a wiki page that describes the website of the person who spammed, just like we have pages about millions of other sites.
However, we don’t want to have pages about spammers. If you could tell us the exact url you’re being spammed with, we’d like to blacklist the site from AboutUs.org. Feel free to email me at steven@aboutus.org or email our Community Officer Mark Dilley at mark@aboutus.org
Dan, I sent you an email to see what website page on AboutUs you are talking about.
Comments on this entry are closed.