The 5HITS

New business models for social marketers. Managing your brand on the web just got interesting. Sidewicki, the tool in your Google Toolbar allowing you to see comments made next to websites has been upgraded to allow you to view these for an entire domain, per the Google blog. You are pretty quickly going to get a view on what a business/ restaurant/ website is about using this feature.

On the upside, to comment users need a Google profile and also need some “trust” or “authority”, lets call it PageRank for profiles before they are published. As more people comment so this bar will rise. So you spam the sidewicki, as with search you will become invisible. But comment wisely and responsibly and you build an ability to influence an extremely important part of todays marketing mix.

Granted:

• Low use and understanding of Google profiles
• Not that hard to set up a profile
• Low use or understanding of Sidewicki, let alone having the toolbar installed

But

• Gmail, Local Business Centre and so on will continually enhance our understanding
• Google social will encourage all to set up profiles, also just to claim your own space
• Online profiles will continue to grow in importance and need to be managed

So this has the opportunity to bring power to the people. You want to book a flight and have some adventure, search for “air tickets to Iraq” and find the #1 ranking site, but low and behold there are numerous sidewicki entires about how that airline runs late, loses your lugage, are rude to customers etc. You still going to book with them?

In the future of search, if there were enough of these and the quality was good, why would they not influence relevance in the algorithm. If you have a company which has positive comments and one with negative comments, which is more relvant to your users?

Spam

So you are thinking, we will set up a lot of profiles and spam them. Don’t forget the redneck rules. You are a redneck when: all your profiles are registered from a single IP address or domain and so on. These will have to be nurtured oer time to get relevance.

The New Social Media Expertise

There is a business model here. Set up various profiles for various industries, build their reputation over time and then sell positive comments. Just like being a powerful Wikipedia editor.

Social marketing experts may not be those that have workshops and talk strategy, but those that can influence profiles through controlled blogs, forums, sidewicki’s, profiles, Facebook pages and so on in the background. How unethical you think. Hasn’t this been happening for years offline with PR agencies, lobbyists and the like?

The times they are a changing, watch this space in 3 years time. Online reputation management will include what online properties you can influence and control, not what artiles you can get inserted into main stream media.