Sidewicki-Reputation Management
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 Read more…
