Brands in Public: All publicity is good publicity right?
Two days ago, Seth Godin launched Brands in Public. I looked at it and thought that it was a great idea to get companies connected to what people are saying on the web and allowing them to “Join the Conversation”.
Seth created some pages for well known brands. I am assuming he did this so these brands can see what their pages would look like and what is actually said about them. I bet most of these companies have no idea how to pull all of this information together. Regardless, doing this caused an public outcry on the web. Some people even created a new word for it: Brandjacking. These posts made it sound like brands in public went and created pages for thousands of brands and that they are now forcing these companies to pay them.
Today Seth decided to take down the Brands in Public pages that they created. They only created 200 of them and I am still positive the only reason they did this was as an example for other brands and not to hijack brands. I think Seth did the right thing by taking down the pages. It is crazy how on the web things can be over exaggerated quite easily. I am also sure that this little fiasco was good publicity for Brands in public. All publicity is good publicity right? what do you think?