Squidoo launches a reputation management timebomb

hmm, this is a cheeky idea, if not a little risky. I can see them being dragged to court quicker than you can say “squidoo”!

Ripping off the RipOffReport business model?

Get people to post inflammatory comments and then charge the businesses to refute them while hiding behind the Safe Harbor Provisions of the DMCA.

Stay classy Squidoo, stay classy.

This is just a poor man’s attempt at blackmailing companies into paying $400/month. Please. Bad business move.

It’s an interesting idea (that anyone could do, including the individual companies themselves), but he’s taking a risk by featuring Google News feeds on the page…

Re: From Google
“We invite you to make NONCOMMERCIAL use of Google’s RSS feeds on your website subject to these terms…” [emphasis mine]

So, aside from the fact the Squidoo page is obviously not ‘noncommercial’ (since they’re charging $400/month), it also doesn’t follow most or all of the remaining terms listed by Google either.

Source:
http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40796

Squidoo already took a hit from Google a couple years back, when many/most/all of their user pages fell hard in the rankings, and I doubt this will help matters much either.

To me it is just a Linkbaiting strategy for improving their SEO for brands. They are probably not really willing to make money on the $400, but to get attention and links to their brand pages. We know that Brands are the some of the most valuable keywords in almost any Search Marketing Campaign.

Rip off Report is what came to my mind too, except in this case they seem, from Seth’s own mouth, to be willing to take pages down upon request.

Google Alerts and Tweetdeck allow you to engage for free, and Salesforce, GetSatisfaction and others already provide this with a better design and less extortion-like way.

400 a month sounds a little fishy to me that’s the let me sign up price

So any brand can set up a page that aggregates this content themselves.
Hosting this on their own corporate TLD could even make it more powerful. Acknowledging that something could be said, and commenting on possible constructive or even negative feedback on your own site probably has more impact than a comment on a Squidoo page.

Once you begin getting paid for managing potentially slanderous content you become corporately complicit with any slander that has been committed by the kind of scum that engages in that activity. The rules that govern forums and other public venues did not take into account a one-sided revenue stream. Legal challenges will surely appear once you have a vested interest. The laws that currently protect neutral parties will definitely be challenged in situations like yours where you are clearly profiting from a one sided revenue stream.

Rip off Report was successfully sued because of its conflict of interest in promoting slander. I imagine you are quite happy to capitalize on the negative publicity this gets you. However when someone like you moves from a place of engendering ethics and creative business models that benefit everyone — and become known for believing in and fostering a win/win kind of business attitude — to profiting from the seedy underbelly of the internet — you alienate the entire audience that wrongly assumed you were more positive and ethical than you really are. However it will definitely gain you a much more combative and troublesome audience as your former believers abandon you.

Enjoy your profit because you definitely lost the respect of many by engaging in this approach to money getting. I have bought your books and audio books before and have considered you to be one of the more forward looking type of people in the marketing industry. In one decision you destroyed the years you put into building that. Wow. This will be awesome to watch.

A primary driver of your message has fostered inspiration for leaders and those who lead. Now providing an extortion like service that appears much like the business model of the ripoff report and other scummy sites that promote no accountability for liars and little to no ability to distinguish between them and legitimate complainers. Meanwhile you suck profit from your former audience — but by no longer inspiring them with new creative ideas and perspectives but by providing yet another platform that assembles and focuses on the dirt people want to say about your former audience of followers. There is big money in dirt. National Enquirer anyone?

Seems like a strange twist. Like a betrayal. Seth Godin rebrands himself overnight. When you prove to your fans that they overestimated you — it is hard to reverse that because they begin to doubt their own judgment. You can’t fix that — only they can — but they won’t forget who showed them they were fools.

As for the “take it down” aspect. “Close that barn door the horse got out”.

Consumers can quickly discern useful information on the internet and these pages will rightly not be treated by them as credible or influencial. They are being created for the benefit of an intermediary hoping to make money where there isn’t any, not for consumers.

Seth,

This is an embarrassment. Squdoo was crap now this is extortion. Go away please.

Sincerely,

A former HUGE fan.

@Douglas Bamlett – I don’t think Squidoo is any more liable for the content they serve than the sources from which the content is scraped. They’re just aggregating, and charging corporations for the ability to add comments, not to edit or remove said content. A company who doesn’t like what they see on Brand in Public could just as easily take a minute and respond to comments in the forum in which they originally appeared. I bet those responses would also make it to Brands in Public, thereby skipping the $400.

It’s essentially a free brand monitoring tool. I think this is a great idea – wish I had thought of it first.

Perhaps I’m missing something . . but this seems to me like Squidoo is simply a very late player in the GetSatisfaction / UserVoice market.

If you are only publishing negative content you are eliminating the context in which commentary is published. This is distortion and is depriving readers of genuine information, not to mention how it impacts on the defence of fair comment re: defamation. If you cut out all the positive comments, its not fair comment or balanced coverage anymore, even if all they say is true or substantially true.

Both here and at Lisa Barone’s blog Seth has weighed-in in the comments section, clarifying how this is a great service, akin to Google alerts, for companies who want to track and participate in the conversations about them at one page.

But is that what the service really is? Check out the Home Depot page. It’s got some nice, subtle Google ads and at least one sidebar ad spliced into it. That tells me the plan is for the Squidoo Home Depot “in Public” page to become a high-ranking, or even the most popular, page for Google searches on “home depot”.

So, Home Depot has a specific page out there which may eventually aggregate their news feed, show their YouTube videos, their content, and all the bad stuff people casually comment about them around the web, AND IT DOESN’T BELONG TO THEM, and it could become a more popular web destination than their own site at which some of that content originated. And to top it off, to make it go away they have to “ask nicely” or pay to participate in that “conversation” about their own company.

Nevermind that they could be fully engaged at Twitter or elsewhere. Now they have to be engaged at Squidoo, too, and they’ll have to pay $5,000 per year to take part in the aggregated conversation at Squidoo.

All the while, Squidoo gets the traffic, the Google ad clickthroughs, and a little revenue from the very company whose name and brand they decided to piggyback. If this were an ad-free service, or one that didn’t require a brand to actually pay to participate, it would have credibility.

As long as a webs site does not show a bias toward injurious content the current laws tend to protect web site owners from liability — if it is clear that they are just providing a neutral platform for others to engage in free speech and not personally engaged in promoting the injurious content. I know of cases where web site owners were shown to have encouraged or promoted defamatory content for gain and were required to pay damages when their bias showed that they actively engaged in promoting the defamatory content of its members and profited from it.

I think any demonstrable bias for injurious content — especially a financially rewarding one is potentially causative to the degree that you can show profit from promoting (locating, assembling, focusing, and elevating the online status of) the injurious content.

Isn’t this is what any publisher does? Take a magazine like the National Enquirer. They pay employees to locate content, they organize it, they assemble it, then they elevate its rank and reach by publishing it in their magazine. To the degree that the content is injurious are they not potentially liable — even if all the content they published was provided by third party contacts? What about if National Enquirer gathers its content electronically — are they not still profiting from publishing content that turns out to be unjustly injurious?

Just because a site like squidoo uses electronic means for gathering, assembling, focusing, and elevating the rank of brand related content does that excuse them from being connected to the effects of their publishing exercise? I think it may if they gain an easily segregated revenue stream from those particular publishing activities.

Google on the other hand does not rank pages based on the degree to which content is, or could be injurious and are therefore not likely to be liable. As far as I know they have no income stream that can be tied to specifically to potentially injurious content. In fact their quality scores appear to be without any bias for truth or fiction of content — but appear to be all about congruence of message, popularity among users, relevance to topics searched for, and authority of message.

Seth, like any web site owner, knows that any content on his site increases in page rank due to the authority already granted by the search engines to his site. That is a pre-established authority that has a known quantifiable reach and authority. As far as anyone knows — google does not increase or decrease squidoos site rank based on whether injurious content is posted there or not. However their site rank (authority) is already a known quantity and anything published through squidoo instantly inherits squidoos authority. Squidoo has a vested interest in promoting both their rank (and reach) and when they leverage their authority to develop a particular income stream — do they not become responsible to some degree for the content driving that revenue stream just as any other publisher would?

Possibly as a result of this dialog — Seth appears to have switched to an opt-in model which immediately reverses any responsibility for content back to the brand owner. Smart move.

Brandon. I don’t know anyone who claims to have been harmed by Seths latest product offering. Therefore I have no opinion about compensation.

I enjoyed Adel Pace’s comments and since she appeared to be responding at least in part to my previous comment — and since she also appears to be an internet lawyer I wanted to respond with my theory. Her comments were directed in part to “chain of causation”. Since I have little legal knowledge but plenty of business experience I gave it my best shot — however protracted my clumsy illustration may have been.

I hope you don’t mind my participation in this discussion — but if you do please know that I do not have any particular position regarding your comments that I care to share.

Nice way of earning huge wealth founded by Squidoo.

From my perspective, this issue is not about legalities. And it’s not about whether there are a ton of websites doing this now.

It’s that Seth Godin has chosen to do this. The man behind the “permission marketing” tidal wave…and the “authentic stories” wave. His position in the marketing-guru world is as the guy pushing for marketing that engages the world in a credible, genuine way. Brands in Public goes entirely against this grain. That’s why this is an issue for a lot of people.

Adele thanks for those clarifications and for your great. Using your illustration of choosing to link to squidoo being an intervening act that may break the chain of causation — I’m curious how that might be interpreted differently that someone purchasing a magazine — or even the act of picking it up? Seems that the publisher does things specifically to attract and motivate that activity. Any comments?

Thanks for the reference to the Gutnik decision. I applaud the courts decision to uphold mass publishing laws as they currently exist. Having been involved in IS for over 26 years I tend to view most of the digital realm as just another delivery system for the same kinds of information.

It seems the laws are rather blurry. Perhaps more than most of us would hope for :). It never dawned on me that a users choice to link to a publisher/aggregator could potentially be viewed as a break in the chain of causation. Again thanks.

…just to add to this…he is actually editing, in the sense that he is selecting negative commentary. This commentary isn’t picked at random or indiscriminate. But it isn’t necessary to prove that he is being selective in the editing. It is still editorial control.

This is an essential part of his business model. He is exercising editorial control in so I don’t see how you can hide behind safe harbour.

Not only is he editing, he is doing so in an unethical manner, ie on a cash for comment basis and responsible for every editorial comment as a result. Message: ‘our ‘journalism’ depends on whether the person the subject of the negative (possibly defamatory content) pays us $400 per month’.

We will let users think that this is content rather than advertising.

Whoever made the comment that it shouldn’t be assessed on a legal basis, I do agree that it is bad for society.

& ralph m
“There are plenty of websites that are “scraping” content. This includes sites that rehash tweets, and others like answers.com, and even Google. That’s right! Google is just s a giant Internet scraper that rehashes content. And we let it, because it’s GodBut Seth Godin comes along with a fabulous idea and all anyone can do is hate on him for “scraping content.” The real reason why it’s an issue is because he’s charging $400/month for it. If Seth were really smart, he wouldn’t have publicized that so much. “

But people’s reaction is a real contradiction in my eyes…yes…. Google are actually publishing it and deciding where it ranks, and have direct control over the algorithm but as we have seen Google seem to be immune on the basis that this is a ‘mechanical’ action devoid of any human intervention. There is constant human intervention at many levels. But that precedent doesn’t seem to matter at this point in time, and maybe one day it will be overturned.

However what Seth Godin is doing is being very selective.

More importantly, whilst Google might be just as selective, they won’t say I won’t publish things by you because you won’t pay be money. They might actually do it, but aren’t so brazen about it.

“So give Godin a break, and stop harassing him for being something that everyone else is. He’s entitled to make money off his ideas if they’re good. I think maybe some of the haters are just a little jealous because they didn’t think of it first”

Traditional journalism does it too and may not be being as honest about it. But they are responsible for what they re-publish. The Journalist knows they are an editor and can’t do it. Seth is doing which what some journalists do, publish all kinds of sensationalist c*** which he can’t necessarily prove and doesn’t necessarily believe is true. Every company that he slanders will have to decide whether they want to pay him off or sue him.

I don’t see what is so novel. Journalists have done this as long as journalism has existed. They tell everyone their editiorial section is separate from their journalism section but both answer to the CEO. With respect to the typical US newspaper, the owner doesn’t necessarily interfere with the editorial section, but in Australia Murdoch is more inclined to do so. The American owners don’t do it for ideological reasons but I am sure everyone is driven by profit. The editors know not to say nasty things about the big advertisers.

It doesn’t need to be money, but journalists always get something out of being nice to people, and have to balance how nice they are to people versus telling ‘the truth’, and it is always a compromise.

Douglas

Thanks. Yes, I saw that he made it opt in.

Its a more appealing model than holding a brand hostage which does destroy the goodwill.