Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
Seth Godin has ginormous balls. There, I said it. — This morning, Seth used his much respected blog to reveal the news about Brands In Public. If you missed it (and if you did, you should really adjust the volume on your Internet) …
Context & Ripple Effects
Seth Godin used his own blog this morning to unveil Brands In Public, an experiment Outspoken Media frames as brandjacking: public pages assembled for brands out of the conversation already swirling around them. For a marketer whose authority rests on being right about attention, launching a platform that aggregates brands rather than serving them is the boldest version yet of the playbook he has run before.
It also lands on contested ground. Back in July 2007, Jason Calacanis publicly asked why Godin was silent about Squidoo's SEO and porn problems, and the two had traded views in a 2006 ten-questions interview; any new Godin-affiliated platform inherits that scrutiny along with his audience.
First-order effects
- The brands that appear on Brands In Public pages wake up to third-party-framed reputation pages they did not commission — their immediate choice is to engage with the pages or leave the narrative to whoever aggregates it.
- Godin converts his blog's distribution power directly into launch traffic for the new property, making his list of readers the platform's initial marketing budget.
Second-order effects
- Brand managers and agencies gain one more unowned surface to monitor and respond to, adding to the workload of reputation management beyond their own sites and official channels.
- Critics who pressed Godin on Squidoo's content-quality record in 2007 now have a fresh test case: if Brands In Public pages surface spam or off-brand material, the same questions about curation and SEO incentives resurface at higher volume.
Third-order effects
- If the model spreads, control over how a brand reads in search results shifts from the brand itself toward whoever operates the aggregation layer — an early skirmish in who owns the stack of rights over publicly generated brand data.
- Platform operators testing how far they can go without explicit brand consent are effectively probing where the legal and PR line sits, and one visible backlash could set the boundary for the whole category.
The trend: Brand communication is shifting from self-published messaging toward intermediary-built pages that aggregate public chatter, with consent and curation as the unresolved variables.