Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency behind the creepy King and subservient chicken, has followed Skittles by relaunching its web site as a conversational hub -- 80% feeds of what others are tweeting or blogging about it. Tim Leberecht at CNET explains that this is more than a trend; it also creates a potential threat for marketers everywhere.
After all, if a conversational hub is intriguing, what happens if someone else builds one for your brand? For example, Leberecht says, imagine "if McDonald's suddenly saw itself confronted with a site aggregating blogs, videos, news, and tweets, all about but not by McDonald's?" Leberecht goes on to suggest brands would have little legal ground for fighting this, since they can control their own intellectual property but not the conversations compiled elsewhere.
Aggregation, it seems, opens the doors for anyone to erect an exciting hub about a topic. Google has become the world's largest case study of offering up content without ownership. If what people say about you has become more important than what you say, what happens if someone else gains control of your conversation first?
2 comments:
Back around 2003, we were just building out the MyST Blogsite framework. The first real prototype multi-channel blogsite we built was a site that was all about the history of the little yellow sticky notes from a really big company. We aggregated a great deal of information about those notes in a very positive way.
We chose this subject because our platform also had the ability (and still does) to transform any content artifact into an electronic desktop version of those sticky notes.
Well, the really big company apparently did not like us talking about them because our first contact from them was a long and very intimidating letter from a major law firm outlining all trouble they were poised to pour onto us if we did not kill the site and give them the domain name (although they did graciously offer to reimburse the fee we paid to register the domain name.)
We just shook our heads and then did what they demanded.
That was many social media eons ago, though; maybe big companies realize they can't control online conversation as much these days. (But I bet there's still plenty of legal tests to come.)
It's also a potential trojan horse, in terms of anyone can link to CP&B and voila...instant coverage on their home page!
All in all I do think it's the right way to go though. It's partially a gimmick for now but it also recognises that people are less and less interested in whatever bells and whistles you've created to attract them to their site.
Instead, your online reputation is the online chatter about you.
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