It’s about your digital footprint: the sum total of all the interactions your customers, prospective customers, fans, antagonists, employees, suppliers, and partners have with your content and services throughout the entire Internet.

A quotation in a recent post on the Inc. Technology blog, It’s Not About Web Traffic Anymore, put it this way:

It’s not about getting people to come to my web site anymore. It’s about getting my content; my videos,my articles, my event promotion announcements, on YOUR web site. That’s what I’m paying attention to now.

– Barbara Scala, Founder of Bloom

I agree wholeheartedly, but remember that “YOUR web site” might be a Facebook news feed, it might be a blog, it might be an link from YouTube sent via IM or a tweet. It’s no longer about getting folks to come play in your garden, but about making yourself available in all the places folks might already be hanging out.

Private Garden (Photo by surprise truck, cc-by license)

Your web presence (which should be a combination of sites, blogs, microsites, and official presences in social networks) is still critical, of course – as the place to which folks will often go for more information, to sign up, to interact with you – but if your efforts stop at the sites you own and control you’re missing out on the majority of the web.

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).

One site which demonstrates this quite well is Noah Brier‘s Brand Tags which presents the user with a brand and asks for a one word (or phrase) tag. The results for BBC, for example, include (in descending order of priority):

news, british, tv, quality, england, television, reliable, english, smart, bbc, boring, radio, top gear, intelligent, serious

Whereas Fox News gets these results (again in descending order of priority):

biased, conservative, news, lies, republican tv, liars, right wing, bias, crap, evil, propaganda, boring, simpsons

Interesting that both end up with “boring,” though I suspect the BBC is happier with its results than Fox News. (Yes, of course, it’s not a fair sample, since the population drawn to Brand Tags may not be representative of the whole population – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t meaningful.)

There’s also a battle mode, in which two brands are presented and the user chooses which “wins”:

Brand Tags in Battle Mode - Which Brand Winds?

Current winners on the leaderboard? Adidas, Google, Pixar, Apple, BMW, Nike, Lego, Coca-Cola, YouTube, and Ferrari make up the top 10.

This week, Seth Godin and Squidoo launched something they call Brands in Public, which is essentially a microsite containing aggregated information about a specific brand from throughout the web, offering the brand owner the opportunity to respond (albeit for a cost). As a starter set, they created 200 “sample pages” for major brands.

Filter Control (Photo by JavierPsilocybin, cc-by license)

Godin claimed the pages offered not exactly control, but an opportunity to influence brand perception:

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.

The Squidoo offering would bring together what users are saying about your brand throughout the web:

If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month. And once [we build] the page, the left hand column belongs to you. You can post responses, highlight blog posts, run contests or quizzes. You can publicly have your say right next to the constant stream of information about your brand (information that’s currently all over the web–and information you can’t “take down” or censor). You can respond, lead and organize. If a crisis hits, your page will be there, ready for you to speak up. If your fans are delighted, your page makes it easy for them to chime in and speak up on sites around the web.

Of course, not all brands were so happy about the fact that Squidoo had created this centralized place to find feedback about them. Meghan Keane of Econsultancy put it the most bluntly (Give Squidoo $400 a month. Or your brand gets it):

Squidoo is providing a forum for brands to monitor, control and influence their reputation online. But rather than letting brands set up their own pages, Squidoo is doing it for them and dangling control over the site for the $400 monthly fee.

If that price sounds like a threat, it is. If Brands in Public becomes a space where people go to learn about brands, it would be in a company’s best interest to influence the way they’re pictured there. It’s up to them to decide if it’s worth paying Squidoo $4800 a year to influencethe way they look in the space.

As a result of the criticism (of which the above was just a single sample), Godin and Squidoo have changed course, and will be only setting up Brand in Public pages for brands which request them. Godin explains:

One way we tried to encourage that was to build 200 sample pages, pages brands could adopt. Alas, some people felt that this was inappropriate, so we’ve recalibrated and we’ll take those pages down before the end of the day.

When a brand wants a page, we’ll build it, they’ll run it and we’ll both have achieved our goals.

So is it band hijacking (taking over control without permission) to set up such a focused page? Isn’t that essentially what all the real time search engines already do, under the radar?

Compare the search results from, for example, Spezify for a brand against what would have been on the Brands in Public page: isn’t the only different the claim to offer some opportunity to respond?

Is the problem rather that the Brands in Public pages offered too little value, in terms of what influence they would enable a brand to exert?

How different is this from the model of Get Satisfaction, which creates a community around given products or services and offers product/service owners the opportunity to participate? (Check, for example, the Nike Community which is actually supported by Zappos not Nike). I don’t believe GetSatisfaction gets permission from brands to enable their products and services to be discussed – is that brandjacking?

How should brands attempt to influence the perception customers, prospects, employees, and partners have of them, and share freely across the web?

At MTV, we’re pretty psched – being our fans BFF has always been important to us as a company.

It’s no accident MTV started as a cable channel – youth were most open to the potential of cable.

Together, we define what MTV is – it is the world’s largest brand gallery.

What we’ve learned: Four Guiding Truths that burn in all of us at MTV

1. It’s not the medium, but the content that matters most.
2. Build an emotional relationship with the users based on content they find compelling.
3. Give your audience a place and mechanism to find each other.
4. You have to let your audience help you shape your brand.

Message over Medium

Create compelling content, then figure out the best screens and experiences through which to engage users.

MTV.com – 10,000 video library – let users play what they want when they want. It isn’t enough to just play what we want online. Also Rock Band, which will let people engage with music in a new and interactive way – but even this starts with the creative impulse and the emotional connection first, then the technology approach.

Tools make a great experience possible – but you have to have a great idea first. At heart, we’re a company of great ideas.

How do you make it stick?

Start with a foundation of great content – then build an emotional relationship on that content with which users want to engage.

52 bands. What if we took all the time we spend promoting our programming – 11.5 hours every week – and gave it to different artists. So we did. We gave that time to new bands – to connect users to new music and up and coming artists.

In an era in which the music video has become a commodity, 52 bands has been a great way for listeners and bands to find each other.

College students were the first to raise their voices about the genocide in Darfur – the MTVu college network creating programming, PSAs, campus events, and a viral video game.

(Christina masterfully transitions from genocide in Darfur to Jackass via George Bush.)

MTV JackassWorld – coming soon.

Let your consumers speak to each other

Give your audience ways to find each other.

Think.mtv.com – “the largest online activist community ever”

Find others who are passionate about the same things you are.

Also the You-R-Here area on MTV.com – MTV’s always covered lots of tours, but this year we’re allowing users to help report through You-R-Here.

Help your audience shape our brand

We want our audiences to feel ownership of the experiences we create, the brands around which we collect.

The MTV Tr3s network for hispanic youth in the US, in which the brand itself was created with deep participation with users.

Real World Online Casting site – tapping into people’s connection with the Real World experience.

Choose or Lose and the presidential election – engaging the audience in a new way, with an outlet specifically targeted to their needs.

Summary:

First, start with great ideas.

Next, add a strong emotional connection.

Let the audience find people like themselves.

Give them ways to let us know what they think – good and bad, and listen to what they say – co-create the brand.

—–

Q: What about the stormy side of the BFF relationship?

A: I’d rather have people be passionate and upset than not carrying. We get lots of positive and negative feedback, but that’s good – we want engagement. It’s ok if people say bad things.

Q: You have the perfect audience who wants to consume, produce, and even be in media – but what if you were in an insurance company, or a paper goods company. Do these principles apply?

A: I think they do. The principles should transfer – it is about putting the audience or consumer at the center of what you do – you’d have different users perhaps, but the point is to focus on the user before the technology and before the tool.

Q: Are the youth audiences of MTV beyond TV, and beyond advertising?

A: Television is important to them, but it is just one of many screens. So advertising has to adopt and change – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. As an example, one of the “remixes” at the VMA was with Herbal Essences and sponsored – that is advertising, but in a different way. The key is an additive experience for the users – not a separate or extraneous piece – but a good show with good content in it. A great piece of entertainment, not an infomercial for Herbal Essences.

Q: Is the MTV brand splintering? How can you cover all these different needs and not lose brand focus?

A: The music industry isn’t splintering – it’s dying, or undergoing an immense change. But the audience isn’t splintering, they want different experiences and we provide multiple different experiences – if you’re giving the audiences what they want you stay relevant. We get lots of criticism on MTV for not showing videos like we did 20 years ago – but you have to evolve and grow as your audience does. Every year new people join the audience and bring new expectations and new experiences – you have to keep in tune with what they are interested in and looking for – that’s what keeps your brand relevant.