Brand Control Revisited: Google Sidewiki

In previous post on the illusory but often sought “brand control on the internet” I talked about Squidoo’s Brands in Public and GetSatisfaction.

Google’s new offering, SideWiki, makes Brands in Public look very web 1.0. Why make consumers come to a third party site just to see all the comments about a brand, when you could put them right next to the brand’s site?

SideWiki, which requires installation of the Google Toolbar, lets you add comments to any web page. You can comment on the page as a whole or on specific highlighted text within the page.
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Cross post Twitter to StatusNet with StatusNet Tools

A few weeks back I created a little plugin that works with Alex King’s Twitter Tools, using an API it provides to also post your notices to a StatusNet instance (Identi.ca, Twit.tv, etc).

You can find that plugin here: Twitter Tools StatusNet (and should be able to find it soon on wordpress.org).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was just how Twitter Tools itself worked, and what that meant about the StatusNet plugin.

Twitter Tools follows all of your tweets, not just those which you enter via WordPress or generate as new blog post notifications. What this means is that using Twitter Tools in combination with the StatusNet plugin, everything you post on Twitter gets also posted to the StatusNet instance you’ve configured.

Everything you post on Twitter, regardless of it’s source: desktop client, SMS, web client, etc.

This means you’ve got to be careful. If you use Identi.ca, for example, and have your Identi.ca account configured to cross post to Twitter (which is a popular option) you’ll create a loop. You post to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, where Twitter Tools finds it and (with my plugin in place) cross posts to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, and so on (repeat until someone tells you your account has gone crazy).
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Brand Control on the Assembled Web

Who controls the meaning of your brand on the internet?

Control! (Photo by Faramarz Hashemi, cc-by license)

One of the principles of the assembled web says:

Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your prospects, customers, partners, and employees say it is. In short, your brand is what the Internet says it is. You influence this not through marketing but through creating appropriate experiences and getting users exposed to those positive experiences. (Micro-interactions are ultimately assembled into and become brands).

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If Facebook were a country

Surely you’ve seen one version or another of this meme. If Facebook were a country, it’d be the Nth largest, where N varies from 9th up to 3rd, depending on how recent your data is. (Just try it on the google or on the Bing).

I tweeted the other day what I think is a better way of completing that sentence, and I’m reposting it here in hopes someone finds it interesting and starts to spread it:

If Facebook were a country, the citizens would have revolted and demand a better terms of service already!

Alright, I didn’t tweet it quite that way, but I like that wording better and it still fits in 140 characters.

How would you finish the sentence?

If Facebook were a country . . . .

Or maybe, what other memes should we start based on the same structure:

If Twitter were a country . . .

If LinkedIn were a country . . .

OMMA Global Day Two: Content Has To Be Everywhere

Yesterday was day two of OMMA Global, and I think the theme(s) of the day were Innovation and Distribution.
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