god I hate PR flacks. "As the [pr] plan was constructed, Johnson & Johnson's top management put customer safety first, before they worried about their companies profit and other financial concerns." Do it for PR, not because its the right thing to do!
Interesting that communicating why one should do 'the right thing' appears wrong. And yes I agree it is somehow unseemly.
Perhaps PR has the language to help financial types appreciate the value of good ethics.
I think software development has had similar problems making the case for good s/w engineering practices being financially sound and not just an nice idea.
What was really going on was that J&J put their long-term interests ahead of their short-term interests. It was not as big risk for them to do so as the writer implies, because they knew their brand was damaged by an external factor rather than something they had done themselves - quite different from the contrasting example of Perrier, where the problem was in their supply chain.
As a rule of thumb, if you are going to accuse someone of being unethical you should have to name the rule of ethics that the person is violating.
The criticisms of the original project, at least the ones I read, didn't actually do this. Instead people were complaining because it reminded them of something unethical that someone else had done, or they didn't think it fit Seth's personal brand, or they were afraid he would do something unethical in the future, or they never liked him to begin with.
Now if people are saying, "you violated X rule of ethics" then it's really easy to apologize for doing that. But in this case that's not what people were saying, so how exactly do you apologize to those people? Especially since in the end the reason Seth backed down was probably at least in part because his personal brand is worth more than the money he could make from the project anyway, regardless of whether he was right or wrong.
It may not have been in the original article, but someone here on HN stated it best–this is basically a protection racket
From Wikipedia: "A protection racket is an extortion scheme whereby a powerful entity or individual coerces other less powerful entities or individuals to pay protection money which allegedly serves to purchase protection services against various external threats, usually violence or property damage."
Powerful entity: Brands in Public with their authority domain and SEO ranking
Purchase protection services: if you pay BIP, you can edit your page, thereby protecting your reputation.
External threats: in this case, not violence but the PR damage your company might suffer if negative/false information appears on the front of your BIP page.
According to the blog post the pages made were all "samples", presumably to demonstrate the service. Fairly shifty, but now that they're taken down and the only way to get one is by request, there doesn't seem to be much to complain about.
The goal of the program is to invite brands into the conversation that's already going on around the web, to make it easy for them to do it on their terms.
No. He can't stop bullshitting; it's pathological.
I don't think the consequences were very obvious. All the service does is aggregate the data pulled in by Google alerts, twitter, and a couple other services so that people can see it all on one page. This is stuff that everyone can already see on their own, so literally nothing has changed. The only difference is that he is offering companies the option to pay money to respond to feedback directly on this aggregated page instead of through the various mediums where it was originated, and I don't think it was at all a given that people would freak out about this.
Presumably, Godin and his colleagues did their research into similar businesses -- namely, Get Satisfaction -- before starting Brands in Public. And if so, they would have known that some companies were not happy with Get Satisfaction's page design and copy, claiming that it hijacked their brands and confused customers.
That is probably why the pages mention "unofficial" 5 times and "automatically generated by" 7 times. And contrary to GetSatisfaction, the associated logo isn't on the page.
None of the criticism I've seen leveled at BIP referenced the actual design of the site, which is on par with Get Satisfaction's vastly improved design and copy. People are just offended by the business model.
Opening up blog comments on a relatively popular website doesn't necessarily encourage discussion. See Youtube, TechCrunch, or really any others. Popular bloggers like Andrew Sullivan have shut down their comments precisely because they prefer a more personal conversation via email rather than the anonymous name calling and hate spewed in your average comment section.
I happen to think there is a place for comments. But I assume by default that most comment sections are open first, then closed because of the vitriol. That stuff takes a real emotional toll over time.
Hate Seth Godin all you want(at times I too cannot resist). Yet, some of the smartest people I've run into were mentored by him. In general, he really can teach how to connect with your users.
Is the problem people have with the fact that he's charging to give access to some of that content?
Also, this really reminds me of the local business scam MerchantCircle is running. They'll register a domain with your company name and aggregate content making a legit looking site which as you can imagine confuses a lot of people.
There is a need for this kind of brand management service. Remember that youTube video by two Domino's employees? However, the model to deliver this service needs to be thought through further.
Sure, you can aggregate that information and offer a dashboard. But this is nothing a large company can't do for itself, and there's no especial value for them in having a standardized dashboard. It's more useful for consumers who might with to go a standard page to look up aggregated info about any given brand before making buying decisions, but they tend to be domain specific - rate-coffeebrands.com rate-cookie-brands.com or suchlike.
It's the old stress on the web - providers and publishers want to be unique and stand out from everyone, consumers would often rather have standardized pages so they can get information quickly and consistently without navigating 100 different kinds of web flair and registering at every site they might be temporarily interested in, which is why portals still exist and probably always will.
In DC this is called the non-apology apology where you express regret for someone else's error.
The real apology version is: "I apologize for my [mistake|error|imprecision|lack-of-clarity]".
The Tylenol Scare showed that massive overcompensating action is how you recover from a PR hit (http://www.aerobiologicalengineering.com/wxk116/TylenolMurde...). You cannot earn back goodwill with half-measures.